FAA extends its SMART traffic advisory tool to all 22 US air route centers

The Federal Aviation Administration has expanded SMART, its AI-based advisory system for managing air traffic, to the airspace of all 22 air route traffic control centers in the United States. The system first went live over the Washington, DC region on September 21. Two months later it covers the entire national airspace system.

The FAA says the system is meant to cut delays and fuel use. Airline chiefs have publicly supported it. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union for the people whose work SMART is designed to advise, says it had no part in building or testing it.

What SMART does

SMART stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. According to an FAA fact sheet cited by Ars Technica, it is a cloud-based system that combines data on "weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow and controller staffing metrics" to predict how traffic will develop. From those predictions it produces scheduling recommendations, suggests optimal flight routes and works out the best order for arriving aircraft.

The system cost $875 million. In its November 10 statement the FAA said: "After a successful initial rollout to the National Capital Region in September, the FAA will now use SMART in the airspace of all 22 centers across the country to reduce delays, reduce fuel consumption and improve the travel experience for the flying public."

The agency's case rests on early numbers. It says SMART has helped reroute 180 flights since the Washington launch, saving an average of 10 minutes and almost 80 gallons of fuel per flight. Those figures come from the FAA and have not been independently checked. Before the national rollout, coverage had already grown from Washington to the centers in Atlanta, Jacksonville and Miami, according to The Dallas Morning News.

The FAA gave the Dallas paper one example: SMART recommended a shorter, faster route for a cargo flight arriving at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The paper noted that the agency did not identify the flight. It also has not said how SMART may have helped passenger traffic.

Where the human decisions sit

The FAA describes SMART as advice, not control. A team of FAA specialists based in Washington reviews each recommendation before it goes to air traffic control facilities around the country. Local controllers can then accept or reject it. In its September announcement the agency said the system "cannot be used to replace the critical role air traffic controllers play or take over control of an aircraft."

So the decision chain changes in two ways. First, the planning work of predicting congestion, picking alternative routes and sequencing arrivals now starts as a machine suggestion. Before, people built that picture themselves from the same inputs. Second, part of the judgement moves to a central validation team in Washington, which sits between the system and the local facility. The local controller keeps the final call, but now often reviews a proposal instead of drafting one.

The tool also takes controller staffing in as an input. That means SMART's view of how much traffic a sector can handle depends partly on how many people are on shift. Given the controller shortage the FAA faces, that design choice matters.

Airlines in, controllers out

The September announcement included supportive statements from Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian and American Airlines CEO Robert Isom. Airlines feel delays and fuel burn directly in their costs, so their interest is plain.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which has more than 15,000 members, told Flying magazine that it was not consulted or involved in the "design, testing, or implementation of SMART and therefore cannot speak to its effect on the air traffic control workforce." Flying also reports that controllers' unions and lawmakers have questioned how the system was developed and how far stakeholders were involved.

The gap is practical as well as political. Controllers decide whether to accept each recommendation. How often they trust it, when they override it and what happens to their workload are exactly the questions their union says it cannot answer, because it never saw the system before deployment. Ars Technica notes that questions about how SMART works were still open from earlier coverage.

What it means for work

SMART takes over the first draft of traffic flow management: forecasting congestion, proposing reroutes and setting arrival order across the whole country. Controllers move from building those plans toward judging plans a machine produced, with a central FAA team checking the output first. The published gains, 10 minutes and nearly 80 gallons per rerouted flight, come from 180 flights and from the FAA alone. Nobody outside the agency has said how often controllers reject SMART's advice, how their workload changes, or who is responsible when a recommendation goes wrong. Because the controllers' union was left out of design and testing, the people closest to the work have had no formal say in how that review step is built. That is the part of the rollout still to be settled.