As the US federal government rolls ahead with its controversial plans to deploy an AI air traffic control system across some of the nation’s busiest airports, one former air traffic controller is speaking out about the unprecedented risks involved.
In an appearance on News Nation, 13-year air traffic control veteran Todd Sheridan Yeary made it clear that the new system — called the Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART — is little-understood, as the aviation community is still asking basic questions about how it’s actually going to be used.
“The first that comes to mind is, what is the tool going to be used for?” Yeary asked. Whether SMART is used as a predictive tool or a prescriptive stand-in for human decisions remains an open question, and the answer is incredibly important for anybody worried about aviation safety.
“If AI is going to be more prescriptive in terms of how you resolve these conflicts at airfields, particularly busy airports… that’s a different question, because air traffic control is a dynamic environment,” Yeary said. “You cannot just put data in and expect that that data is still going to be good, because the conditions of air traffic control are constantly changing. So I want to see how they want to use it, but I’m a little suspect, and very conservative about its utility right now.”
Asked what his biggest concern was, Yeary told News Nation “one word: hallucination.”
“AI has been known to produce data and information that is not accurate and not verfieid, and so what are going to be the sources from which AI is getting this information?” he worried. “If it’s from airline schedules that’s one thing… there has to be some room for there to be an override, and that override has to come from the controller on duty.”
Discussing the planned roll-out — SMART’s “soft launch” is coming first to the extremely busy airfield around the DC metro area — Yeary didn’t mince words: “anything other than a simulator to roll this out is a problem.”
“Until we really have a chance to really kind of test on real-life-like scenarios, it is very difficult to say we’re going to rely on this information in a real time exercisem” Yeary said. “I think there’s a lot more that we don’t know, and I don’t want to try to find out in the middle of a scenario that is going on in real-time at an airport.”
The SMART rollout comes amid a major aviation communications failure on Monday, where a core telecoms line and its redundancy went down at the same time near Philadelphia. The ensuing chaos left hundreds of planes delayed for hours across the east coast, and raised important questions as to whether the country’s ailing air traffic control system — and its overworked flight control personnel — will be able to shoulder the burden of a highly experimental AI system.
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