The Department of Transportation rolled out a new AI tool to assist air traffic controllers at three Washington-area airports last month — and it’s already having a positive impact.
The SMART tool — short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories — assists controllers in making decisions. It is still in its initial stage of deployment, but has helped reroute 110 flights, saving up to 30 minutes and 56 gallons of fuel on flights and had a positive effect on 14,644 passengersp.
Those modest savings could be much greater if applied to all 44,000 to 45,000 flights which take off each day across the US.
SMART collates data from 200 different streams on information including weather, flight paths, and traffic flow, and creates reports which can pre-empt disruptions. It was developed with air traffic data analytics firm Air Space Intelligence (ASI).
“Instead of leaving air traffic to deal with all these issues, we are actually getting ahead of issues and solving them before it actually becomes a problem,” said Rebecca Guy, the FAA’s acting chief technology officer and a career official.
SMART is the first step in upgrading the often-decades old systems used in flight command centers, which typically rely on old-fashioned paper maps of flight routes and a variety of static datasets, including weather, departure times and arrival times.
The DOT stress the system is monitored by “aviation specialists” who identify where congestion or bad weather could cause backups and relay that information to air traffic controllers, rather than have computers makes decisions.
In practice, that system could mean, for example, recommending a plane leave five minutes earlier to get ahead of inclement weather which could dramatically delay a flight.
“We want to get to a place where you get on a plane and you know exactly when you will land,” Guy said of where she sees the industry heading in a few years.
DOT plans to expand the tool nationwide in the coming months, but it has been met with resistance from Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Don Beyer, who have called for a pause in its usage.
They wrote an open letter citing concerns about testing, training and a completely unrelated instances of AI bots going rogue. Their letter referenced how an Anthropic AI system created fake identities to deceive humans — even though the SMART system doesn’t rely on botsand was created by a different developer.
AOC tweeted she was, “urging the FAA to stop the rollout”
One of the main criticisms in the letter is that air traffic controllers weren’t properly “trained” on the new system.
DOT notes says aviation specialists monitor the tool and relay information to controllers, so they don’t — at this point — interact firsthand with the system and therefore need training.
Likewise, the letter questions how SMART may adjust schedules and potentially even routes, but DOT officials note the system can’t change anything since its data is analyzed by air traffic controllers, who are the ones to make the decision to act, or not.
They also criticize the SMART efforts, saying it is no “substitute for rebuilding the human-directed air traffic controller workforce.” But the DOT has already hired over 2,200 trainee controllers, a record number, and is doing everything it can to build up its workforce, which has been short for decades.
CEOs from every major airline including American, Delta, United and Southwest have all publicly applauded the efforts.
Airlines for America CEO & President Chris Sununu added, “The FAA SMART initiative is finally making sure we will have the best flight management tools.”
The backlash seems to represent a “growing divide, with some Democrats eschewing AI across the board without considering its application, — even when it has helped workers and does not show signs of replacing them,” a source told The Post.
