An artificial intelligence project launched inside America’s aviation safety agency is aimed at easing burdens on the thousands of air traffic controllers who guide planes through the skies, companies involved in the nascent effort told POLITICO.
The initiative, being spearheaded by Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford, envisions a dramatic revamp of how the nation’s increasingly complex airspace functions. But it would not seek to supplant the role of human controllers in making the second-by-second decisions needed to keep air travel safe, two of the project’s three vendors said.
Instead, the project’s goal is to reduce flight delays and make controllers’ jobs easier by better harnessing information like airline scheduling data to reduce plane congestion before it occurs, according to aerospace technology company Thales and software firm Air Space Intelligence. Palantir, the third technology corporation involved in the effort, declined to comment.
The AI-powered initiative is called the Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories, or SMART.
“To be very clear, SMART is not aimed at separating aircraft or doing any of those kind of safety critical functions,” said Todd Donovan, Thales’s vice president for airspace mobility solutions for the Americas.
“It’s really about organizing the demand on the airspace, the demand on the airport, so that we don’t cause congestion unexpectedly. We try to deal with it proactively,” Donovan said. However, he also said SMART could prevent “two aircraft being in conflict.”
What that looks like in practice is still unclear, including how the technology would fit into the FAA’s existing mesh of computer systems. It may take months before an answer is in hand as Thales, Air Space Intelligence and Palantir, whom the FAA invited to participate in the initiative, compete to head the project.
The agency said it plans to award a contract “soon,” adding that SMART will “predict air traffic flows and adjust departure times to resolve conflicts.” The National Air Traffic Controllers Association union, which represents the FAA’s nearly 11,000 fully certified controllers, acknowledged a request for comment but didn’t provide a statement.
The AI effort comes amid Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar endeavor to upgrade the aging technology and facilities that controllers use before President Donald Trump’s second term ends. NATCA has supported this overarching goal.
The endeavor is underway a year after the deadly airline-helicopter crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport — the nation’s worst aviation disaster in nearly a quarter-century — laid bare the increasing strain on the United States’ overburdened air safety system.
In a recent interview with CBS News, Duffy rejected the idea of supplanting controllers with automated technology.
“Am I gonna replace a controller and have AI manage the airspace?” he said. “The answer to that is hell no, that’s not gonna happen.”
The big picture
Controllers’ main responsibility is physically separating aircraft, while an FAA command center outside of Washington manages the balance of airspace demand and capacity at a broader scale. This latter strategy aims to mitigate issues that can ripple across the aviation system such as storms, staffing shortfalls or too many planes arriving at an airport around the same time.
Take, for example, bad weather sweeping across the Southeast. Controllers at a local FAA building might direct pilots to wait in a holding pattern away from a thunderhead until it passes over an airport.
But hours before that, with disruption possible across the wider area, the FAA may limit the number of aircraft that can fly through the entire region. This type of planning appears to be what SMART is honing in on — versus the kind of in-the-moment, quick-thinking decisions that controllers often make, such as, for instance, redirecting an approaching jet away from an airport when a helicopter is also flying nearby.
“The idea is you start months in advance, looking at [carrier] schedule data, and as you get closer, you start having forecasted weather. … ‘Tomorrow, there’s supposed to be a storm coming to this area, so you may get low visibility at [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport], and you may as a result of that lower the capacity,’” Donovan said, referring to the number of flights. “How do we think about it a day in advance and work with the airlines to say, ‘OK, can we space things out a little bit, can we anticipate some of it’ so that … collectively we’re not all just reacting to something happening, we’re actually planning for it and trying to smooth things out.”
Phillip Buckendorf, CEO of Air Space Intelligence, said that “weeks and months” beforehand, “you want to basically predict the flight trajectories based on the schedules that are out there,” then as more information comes in the day of travel, “how do you basically adjust everything, flight by flight through AI,” to “optimize” the airspace. Alaska Airlines has contracted with his company for an AI platform to help dispatchers with “improving the predictability and flow” of traffic.
Making changes ‘upstream’
But Donovan said SMART could also ward off at least some cases in which controllers need to step in to ensure that planes remain safely apart.
The project, he added, is an invitation-only, “challenge-based” competition in which the FAA is assessing what Thales, Air Space Intelligence and Palantir come up with.
“What’s happening is strategically preflight, or before a flight gets to an air traffic controller, some small adjustment’s been made upstream. And as a result of that, instead of two aircraft being in conflict,” Donovan said, they will pass by each other at an appropriate distance.
“‘What if we slow the aircraft down 30 minutes earlier by just a tiny bit?’ … So the controller now sees the traffic, looks at it,” and there’s “no problem,” he said. “The job doesn’t change, but the idea is that the workload should be lower.”
Buckendorf said SMART is focused on traffic flows, but there will be “a lot less stress on the tactical side” — leading to increased efficiency and safety.
The Air Current first reported the initiative.
Each of the companies has a lab at the FAA’s Washington headquarters, and Bedford stops by to check out the work, Donovan said.
During a media event in Washington last month, Bedford likened the nation’s airspace to “Los Angeles gridlock,” adding that every morning it is “filled with conflicts and delays and potential cancellations.”
Duffy at a separate conference in April, without referencing SMART by name, said three companies are working with federal officials on “developing software to look at … how flights are managed.”
“We can now use AI,” he said.
The initial “proof of concept” phase is “coming to an end,” Donovan said, and Bedford is targeting September for the start of an operational demonstration, with “validation and confidence building” to follow throughout the rest of 2026.
For whichever company wins, how the FAA will contract out the project is uncertain.
“It’s not a program that, as far as I know, has a budget line item,” Donovan said, with the FAA scrounging together money “to pay for what they’re doing now.”