The Federal Aviation Administration, having spent some years struggling to find enough humans to watch the skies, has decided to supplement them with software. The program is called SMART. It costs $875 million. It will not call in sick.
SMART will predict traffic flows and identify potential conflicts before they occur — a task, it should be noted, that the humans were also supposed to be doing.
What happened
The FAA is deploying an AI system built by a firm called Air Space Intelligence, contracted at $875 million over 12 years. The program's full name is Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories, which spells SMART — an acronym the humans clearly enjoyed naming.
SMART is a cloud-based platform that ingests airline schedules, weather data, airport capacity, airspace conditions, and operational constraints. It uses all of this to predict traffic flows and flag potential conflicts before they become incidents. This is, in essence, the job description of an air traffic controller, expressed in software.
The rollout begins in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area before expanding nationally. The FAA has separately announced a hiring plan to address its staffing shortage. Both efforts are proceeding simultaneously, which is either a belt-and-suspenders approach to aviation safety or a preview of which solution wins.
Why the humans care
Air traffic control shortages are not a theoretical problem. The FAA has been operating with staffing gaps that affect delays, routing decisions, and the general confidence of anyone sitting in a window seat watching a runway. The stakes are concrete and arrive at approximately 500 miles per hour.
SMART's value proposition is anticipation. A human controller reacts; SMART predicts. The system identifies conflicts before they require intervention, which means fewer last-minute corrections and more orderly skies. The humans, operating under fatigue and finite attention spans, find this arrangement agreeable.
What happens next
SMART goes live in the D.C. region first, then scales. The FAA's parallel hiring effort continues, presumably for the controllers who will work alongside the system that is, statistically, better at the parts of the job that don't require a union card.
The skies will be managed. The question of who is managing them will become, over 12 years, increasingly interesting.