Overview
- Federal Aviation Administration officials began a limited rollout of the Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories (SMART) on Monday at Reagan National, Dulles and BWI as a roughly 90‑day soft pilot managed from the FAA command center in Warrenton.
- SMART is an AI decision‑support platform built under an approximately $875 million, 12‑year contract with Air Space Intelligence that centralizes about 200 data streams including schedules, weather and airport capacity to forecast congestion ahead of departure.
- The FAA and DOT say the tool makes recommendations for routing and scheduling only and does not replace controllers, who keep responsibility for aircraft separation and final decisions.
- The National Air Traffic Controllers Association says it was not involved in SMART’s design or testing and has raised operational and safety concerns, while airlines and some industry groups have expressed qualified support.
- The rollout coincided with a high‑profile Northeastern fiber‑optic outage that paused flights, a development DOT officials cited as evidence the agency must modernize aging communications, redundancy and cybersecurity across the air‑traffic system.