The FAA said on November 10 it will use its SMART AI advisory system in the airspace of all 22 air traffic control centers across the country, turning a tool that started in the National Capital Region into a nationwide part of Us Airspace operations. The system is meant to help controllers make scheduling choices, pick better routes and sequence arrivals more efficiently, but it is still an advisory tool, not a replacement for the people who run the airspace.
The expansion follows the agency’s claim that SMART helped reroute 180 flights after it was first put into service over Washington, DC, on September 21. The FAA said that early use saved an average of 10 minutes per flight and nearly 80 gallons of fuel per flight, figures the agency is now using to justify a broader rollout across the national airspace system.
SMART is a cloud-based system that pulls together weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow and controller staffing metrics before offering recommendations. The FAA said a human team of specialists based in DC validates those recommendations before they are passed to air traffic control facilities, and local controllers can still decide whether to accept them. In one example released by the agency, the system suggested a shorter, faster route for a cargo flight arriving at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
The nationwide step also puts Ed Bastian and other airline executives who backed the rollout on the same side as the agency at a moment when the air traffic controllers’ union is not. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which represents more than 15,000 members, said it was not consulted or involved in SMART’s design, testing or implementation and said it therefore could not speak to its effect on the workforce. That leaves a basic question at the center of the rollout: the FAA has shown that SMART can produce cleaner routing in limited use, but it has not said how the system will change controller workload or delay patterns once it is spread across all 22 centers.
The agency is betting that the early Washington, DC results will hold up at scale. SMART is described by the FAA as a $875 million system, and its next test is not whether it can generate advice, but whether that advice remains useful when it is fed into daily operations across the entire country.
