The Federal Aviation Administration has started putting an artificial-intelligence system in charge of predicting where the national airspace will jam — and the Washington, D.C., area is the test bed.
The software is called SMART, for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories. It sits inside a larger platform, Flow Management Data and Services, which the FAA describes as the new technological backbone of its Air Traffic Control System Command Center. Deployment in the Washington region began in the middle of September, and the agency has said initial operations would start in the fall of 2026.
Both were built by Air Space Intelligence, a company the Department of Transportation picked earlier this year under a contract worth $875 million over 12 years.
What the system actually does
SMART does not talk to pilots and does not move aircraft. It works upstream of that, in the hours and days before departure.
According to the FAA, the platform is cloud-based and ingests airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions and operational constraints, then predicts how traffic will flow and flags conflicts before they happen. Quartz reported that the system can identify a potential pinch point as much as 45 days out and propose schedule adjustments to defuse it.
That is a different problem from the one most people picture when they think of air traffic control. The controller in the tower is solving the next 90 seconds. The Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, is solving the next 12 hours across the continent — deciding which departures get held on the ground when a line of thunderstorms is about to close a corridor over the Midwest.
The numbers around it
- $875 million — value of the Air Space Intelligence contract
- 12 years — its length
- End of 2028 — the FAA's target for nationwide coverage
- $12.5 billion — already allocated for the broader air traffic modernization program
Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy has asked Congress for a further $6 billion to $10 billion specifically to fold AI into that modernization.
"A tool," not a replacement
The rollout lands on an agency that has spent two years short of controllers and running equipment old enough to draw congressional hearings. It also lands at a moment when putting AI anywhere near aviation safety invites an obvious question.
Duffy answered it directly: "AI is a tool, but we do not replace humans in how we manage the airspace." FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford framed the system as an upstream fix — "FMDS with the SMART capabilities will help us address that challenge by improving how we manage airspace before flights depart." The controllers' union has characterized the upgrade as something other than competition for its members.
Chris Sununu, chief executive of the trade group Airlines for America, said the technology "leverages the latest technologies to make air traffic more efficient and timely while maintaining our gold standard of safety." Phillip Buckendorf, who runs Air Space Intelligence, called it "an exciting moment for the millions of Americans who rely on air travel every day."
The claim worth watching is narrower than the language around it. SMART is a prediction engine, and a prediction engine is judged on the delays that never happen — a number nobody sees. The Washington rollout is the first chance to measure it.
Reporting from the Federal Aviation Administration, Quartz and TechCrunch.
