The Trump administration is rolling out an experimental air traffic control system on Monday that uses AI to assist with recommending flight routes and predicting traffic flows, and would-be travelers expressed outright panic.
“So this isn’t going to end well,” wrote Zack Nelson, a prominent tech vlogger, in a social media post on X to his more than 950,000 followers.
Known as the Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART, the $875 million system is slated to be deployed nationwide by 2028, but will be used for three Washington, D.C.-area airports starting Monday: the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
According to The New York Times, Federal Aviation Administration officials have stressed that the new tool won’t replace human air traffic controllers, but rather, offer them “recommendations” that controllers can “choose to heed or ignore.”
However, the assurances from FAA officials did little to quell concern among critics.
“This is going to kill people. And when it does, the people that okayed this need to be charged with murder,” warned Mark Brooks, a professional comic-book illustrator who’s worked with both DC Comics and Marvel Comics.
Left-wing political commentator McAuley Holmes called the FAA’s use of the tool “actually insane,” and professional photographer and podcaster Richard Bernabe vowed to never fly into the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport again.
Others, like independent journalist Adam Cochran, flagged previous instances of AI allegedly being utilized by the Trump administration that ended disastrously. Such instances include the reported use of AI in the deadly U.S. strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed at least 123 children, as well as the U.S. military’s mobilization to board a Chinese vessel that AI had wrongly concluded was “hauling components” for a nuclear weapons program.
The government literally just told us that: -AI was responsible for the mistake of targeting a school in Iran and killing over 100 school girls. -Almost caused a conflict with China due to a hallucination about transporting nuclear material And they want it to run air… https://t.co/UGsMS1XXXG — Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) September 20, 2026
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