Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
FAA eases airlines' SMART concerns by narrowing initial rollout to three airports
The airlines spent weeks asking the FAA to narrow SMART, and the version debuting this month hands controllers route advice at the three Washington-area airports under a 90-day test. The agency's own officials describe it as both record speed and a slow roll.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- SMART, the FAA's routing AI, debuts in coming days. It will offer advice to controllers handling flights for the three airports that serve Washington, according to two industry officials.
- The tool is not expected to create new procedures for controllers or airlines; it generates alternative route information that passes through the FAA's existing systems.
- Three airline officials said the industry was bewildered for weeks about how the system would work, and that repeated meetings with the FAA left them with more questions than answers.
- The FAA convened a Sept. 10 meeting between Administrator Bryan Bedford and the major airline CEOs, including those of United, American, Delta and Southwest, which two officials said eased many concerns.
- SMART belongs to a larger 12-year, $875 million contract effort to modernize the country's air traffic control system.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- precedent The airlines agreed once the scope shrank. Any operator putting AI into a safety-critical workflow will now be asked to follow the same sequence, bounding the output first and arguing about accuracy later.
- contradiction The FAA is selling record speed and a fundamental change in how it manages the skies. Its Secretary promises a slow roll. Which description governs decides what the airlines actually signed up to last week.
- decision The CEOs endorsed a trial. The scope argument has to be held again when the test period closes, and the agency will be negotiating from a position where wider rollout was always the stated plan.
- exposure Nothing new is added to controllers' procedures, so there is no fresh review step to catch a bad route suggestion. The individual controller absorbs the judgement call every time.
The airlines won a limit on what the tool's output is allowed to do, and that limit is what the industry had been asking for. One airline industry official, granted anonymity, told POLITICO that the industry had been requesting and talking to the FAA about narrowing the scope of the tool and taking it in stages, and that ultimately that is what the agency decided to do. The specific fear was depth of integration into daily air traffic management. "I think that's what people were freaking out about," another industry person said.
POLITICO's account describes the scope of the rollout and the meetings that produced it, without performance data for the model or the criteria the FAA will use to judge the 90 days.
The agency is describing the same tool in two registers. FAA spokesperson Hannah Walden said the agency is "moving at record speed to modernize America's National Airspace System, and SMART will fundamentally change the way we manage our skies," and that "Instead of waiting for congestion or weather to cause delays, SMART helps us see problems coming and act before they do." In the same statement she said airlines have been "at the table" since the beginning and that the FAA is "welcoming their feedback as we deploy SMART, which is why we're taking a slow, methodical approach to the rollout." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put it more plainly at a Tuesday talk at the National Artificial Intelligence Association in Washington: "We have to do a slow roll into the airspace." The FAA's turn toward AI follows the midair collision over Washington in January 2025 and a fatal runway crash at LaGuardia in March.
The trial is small next to the program it sits inside. The modernization contract effort runs 12 years at $875 million, an average of roughly $73 million a year, and 90 days is about 2 percent of that term.
The airlines' stated objection was commercial. Some of their officials worried the tool would drive up cancellations and reschedulings, a costly headache for carriers and passengers, and nobody involved alleged that the system would compromise safety. Advice that raises the cancellation rate costs money whether or not a controller was free to decline it. The commercial question survives the narrowing.
The airline chiefs who met Administrator Bryan Bedford on September 10 gave a reception that was "exceptionally favorable and supportive of the effort," according to a fourth airline official. What they endorsed was a 90-day trial at three airports. Bedford has said the hope is that the tool goes wider once the test period ends.
What to watch
- Whether the FAA publishes what the 90 days measured before extending SMART beyond the Washington-area airports.
- Whether expansion converts SMART's output from advice into a procedure controllers or airlines are expected to follow.
- Whether carriers report changes in cancellations or reschedulings attributable to SMART during the test window.