FAA Puts AI System SMART Live in the Washington Area — With a 90-Day Test and Immediate Resistance

FAA Puts AI System SMART Live in the Washington Area — With a 90-Day Test and Immediate Resistance

On Monday, September 21, 2026, the first US FAA system with AI-generated recommendations for flight traffic management went into operation at three Washington-area airports.

On Monday, September 21, 2026, the first US FAA system with AI-generated recommendations for air traffic management went into operation at three airports in the Washington area. That same day, an unrelated equipment failure in Philadelphia led to ground stops and hundreds of delays across the Northeast, and a member of Congress demanded the system be immediately suspended.

The system, referred to as SMART, is now in use at Ronald Reagan Washington National, Dulles International and Baltimore/Washington International, according to POLITICO. The tool is first to run a 90-day test period before it may be rolled out to more US locations. At the same time, sources describe the rollout differently: While POLITICO and NPR describe an official launch on Monday, Futurism, citing Bloomberg, refers to it as a "soft launch" with it unclear which facilities were actually activated. The system's full name is also rendered differently across sources — an uncertainty that only primary FAA documents can resolve.

What SMART does — and who built it

In the initial phase, SMART is to provide traffic management recommendations, not take over control. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sought to head off the obvious concern at the launch press conference: "There's a lot of conversation about AI and who controls the airspace," he said, according to POLITICO, before stating: "It's always going to be a human that manages the airspace in America."

Behind the system is Air Space Intelligence, a relatively small company that previously developed AI-augmented software for flight dispatchers at Alaska Airlines and other companies, according to NPR/LAist. This contract is a substantially larger and more visible test case for the company.

The scope of the contract is considerable — but the figures should be read as journalism, not as documented FAA fact. NPR/LAist reports that the FAA has paid $875 million for a 12-year contract, part of a $12.5 billion modernization program for air traffic management. Yahoo, citing the Wall Street Journal, gives the same contract figures. No primary FAA documents underlie the source set.

Why the FAA says the system is needed

The authorities' argument points to weaknesses in the current arrangement. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a Senate hearing, according to the WSJ as cited by Yahoo: "The way we manage traffic today is chaotic, and we can do better." In the same testimony, he argued, per the WSJ's account, that traffic management "must be controlled by the FAA, rather than trusting commercial airlines to just plan however they want."

The industry organization Airlines for America, which represents the major US airlines, stated in a statement that SMART can improve safety, increase capacity and raise efficiency — to the benefit of travelers and freight. This is a trade organization's assessment, not a documented result.

The resistance: union and member of Congress

The backlash came quickly. The air traffic controllers' union NATCA distanced itself from the project: According to NPR/LAist, the union stated in a statement that it has not been involved in the design, testing or implementation of SMART, and therefore cannot speak to the system's effect on the controller workforce at this point.

Representative Don Beyer, whose district in Northern Virginia includes Reagan National, demanded the immediate suspension of the platform. According to a written statement to WUSA9, cited via Yahoo, Beyer warned against the FAA using his constituents as "guinea pigs" for an unproven AI system, writing that "dangerously" rushing a system that holds Americans' lives in its hands is "not a good use case for artificial intelligence."

A more nuanced assessment came from Dave Riley, a retired FAA air traffic controller. "It won't replace humans. It'll be another tool in the toolbox," he told NPR/LAist. But he doubted that SMART solves what he sees as the core problem: the staffing shortage among controllers.

Same day: ground stops in the Northeast — with no link to SMART

The launch coincided with a major but, according to all available sources, entirely unrelated event. A failure on a primary circuit at an air traffic facility in Philadelphia, combined with a discovered severed fiber backup line, led to ground stops and hours of delays at Newark Liberty, John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia, POLITICO reports.

Reuters, cited by Futurism, reports that over 600 flights were delayed at Newark and Philadelphia alone, in addition to hundreds more at four other East Coast airports. Duffy claimed on X that Amtrak had accidentally cut the fiber line — a claim not yet verified, and one Amtrak did not respond to inquiries about. Bedford stated, according to CBS News, that the repair would take around 13 hours.

It is important to be clear: There is no indication that this stoppage is connected to SMART. Futurism characterizes any link between the ground stop and the AI rollout as pure speculation, and early reports do not point in that direction. The timing is nonetheless politically unfortunate: A system launched as a modernization of traffic management was introduced the same day that conventional equipment failures created major delays in the Northeast.

What the 90 days are meant to answer

The test period now beginning must provide answers to several questions that neither the FAA, the union nor the industry has addressed:

• What is measured as success? There is no publicly defined evaluation methodology for the 90-day period.
• How deeply do the recommendations intervene? The sources vary slightly on whether SMART initially recommends adjustments to flight schedules or changes to flight routes. Official FAA documentation will clarify this.
• Who has evaluated the system beforehand? NATCA's statement that the union has not been involved in design, testing or implementation stands in contrast to the industry's optimism — and neither party says anything about actual performance in operation.
• What is the system called, and what does it really cost? Conflicting accounts of both the name and the contract's scope make primary FAA documents necessary.

What is already clear is that the political resistance will not disappear. Beyer's demand for immediate suspension and NATCA's clear distance set — independently assessed — limits on how much free rein the 90-day test actually provides. At the same time, both Duffy's and Riley's assessments hold to the same point: SMART is intended as support for humans in the tower, not a replacement. Whether the system actually delivers better decision-making in practice, no one in the source set can yet document.