The FAA's plan to fix air traffic? $875M worth of AI

The Federal Aviation Administration is preparing to launch an AI software program called SMART, aimed at easing the air traffic control shortage that has dogged the agency for years. According to The Wall Street Journal, the program will cost $875 million and run over a 12-year period.

SMART stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories. A one-page readout on the program describes it as "a cloud-based platform system that enhances existing FAA air traffic management systems" — in practice, automation software for air traffic operations.

Its job description is specific. The program uses AI to assess airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions, and operational constraints, then predicts traffic flows and identifies potential conflicts before they occur. That is not a chatbot: it puts AI into the operational decisions of critical infrastructure, where a model's output feeds directly into how controllers work.

The vendor is a firm called Air Space Intelligence. The $875 million covers the 12-year term, per the Journal, and the software will roll out in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area first before expanding to other regions.

The procurement has an obvious backdrop. The FAA has been struggling to manage an air traffic control shortage nationwide, and earlier this year the agency announced what it called a "bold, new" hiring plan that it said would "erase the longstanding staffing shortage." Separately, the government is engaged in a broad effort to modernize the country's aging air traffic systems.

The nature of the project is what makes it significant. Traffic-flow prediction and conflict detection sit close to safety, and their output enters a controller's decision loop, so expectations around validation, accountability, and failure handling run far higher than for ordinary enterprise AI. Whether frontline controllers trust and adopt the tool may matter more than any benchmark.

Three things are worth watching: when SMART actually goes live in the D.C. area and how its performance is evaluated, whether it expands to additional regions on schedule, and whether the 12-year contract's phased delivery and acceptance criteria are made public. The hiring plan, meanwhile, will shape how much the software can ultimately accomplish.