Mere days after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) dramatically expanded the use of an AI air traffic control tool nationwide, the agency issued an extremely rare ground stop for all flights in the entire country this afternoon.
Secretary of transportation Sean Duffy tweeted that the ground stop is “following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” adding that “FAA technicians are investigating the issue.”
While it remains unclear whether the Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories (SMART) system is connected to the first full ground stop since January 2023, Homeland Security administrator Markwayne Mullin admitted live on TV that his agency was investigating the possibility after a reporter pointed out the suspicious timing.
“We’re looking at that,” Mullin told the reporter, referring to SMART. “We’re working with our counterparts throughout all agencies.
The government contractor behind SMART, Air Space Intelligence, quickly denied that the ground stop is in any way connected to its tool.
“The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC,” the company wrote in a statement.
According to a November 10 FAA statement, the SMART system is meant to assist air traffic controllers to “reduce delays, reduce fuel consumption and improve the travel experience for the flying public.”
The system — which cost the government just shy of $1 billion dollars — had already been in use in Washington, DC. However, a national rollout of the system this week came just days before the entire country’s airspace ground to a halt, in timing that’s bound to bring new scrutiny to the deployment. Considering tens of thousands of people can be in the air over the US at any given moment, a hallucinating AI model giving flawed advice to an air traffic controller could easily have disastrous consequences.
The midterm elections earlier this month made it abundantly clear that the American public rejects AI — and data centers in particular — wholesale. Any suggestion that an AI-powered air traffic control system caused a widespread grounding would nothing to help the tech industry and the Trump administration regain their trust.
More on air traffic control and AI: The FAA Is Spending Nearly a Billion Dollars to Make AI the “Brain” of Air Traffic Control Towers, Starting This Monday
The post Entire US Airspace Shut Down Days After the FAA Rolled Out an AI Air Traffic Tool. Was It a Coincidence? appeared first on Futurism.
