FAA expands AI-assisted SMART planning tool across 22 air-route centers

The Federal Aviation Administration said it is expanding its AI-assisted SMART traffic-planning system from the Washington region to airspace handled by all 22 U.S. en-route control centers. The move extends the tool’s scheduling recommendations nationwide, but does not give artificial intelligence control of aircraft or replace air traffic controllers.

Those recommendations pass through several human review points. Specialists at the SMART center in Washington analyze and validate the system’s data before sending scheduling recommendations to the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Warrenton, Virginia. The Command Center then routes them to air traffic control facilities, where local leaders decide whether to accept or pass on each suggestion. The FAA has said all recommendations are reviewed by agency staff and that controllers remain responsible for safely separating aircraft.

SMART, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, is a cloud-based planning layer that combines 200 data streams, including weather, flight paths, traffic flow and controller staffing metrics. The FAA says its AI-supported engine uses those inputs to anticipate demand, capacity and weather constraints. According to the agency’s SMART fact sheet, the system runs alongside existing air traffic management systems and updates forecasts and recommendations as conditions change.

Since limited operations began September 21, the FAA says, SMART has helped reroute 180 flights, saving an average of 10 minutes and almost 80 gallons of fuel per flight. Those figures come from the agency. Its November 10 statement did not disclose the comparison baseline, sample composition or calculation method, and did not identify an independent audit of the results. The statement said SMART would now be used in airspace handled by all 22 centers, but gave no center-by-center activation schedule or indication that every center was already operational.

In June, the Transportation Department awarded Air Space Intelligence a contract for SMART and the related Flow Management Data and Services platform. The department described SMART as an enhancement to that platform that coordinates schedules and trajectories before departure to reduce congestion.

The nationwide expansion follows an October 9 request from six House members who asked the FAA to pause the Washington-area rollout until it answered questions about pre-deployment testing, performance during severe weather or outages, consultation with controllers and other stakeholders, worker training, evaluation standards and accountability if a recommendation contributes to an incident. The letter was an oversight demand, not a finding that SMART had caused an incident.

The FAA’s November 10 statement does not say whether the agency answered those questions before announcing the national expansion. The public materials cited here also do not provide recommendation error rates, acceptance or rejection rates, validation methods, independent test results, performance thresholds, or details on how recommendations, overrides and model changes are logged and audited.