FLYING Magazine
The FAA this week provided fresh details on how Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories (SMART)—an artificial intelligence-powered air traffic management system designed to predict weather, traffic, and other conditions months in advance—will initially be deployed.
Steve Fulton, an FAA senior certification advisor and technical pilot, said SMART’s initial operational demonstration will focus on en route airspace 24,000 feet and above, Aviation Week reported. The deployment is on track for September, he said.
Fulton made the remarks during the FAA/European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) annual safety conference on Monday.
Fulton reportedly compared SMART to the FAA’s trajectory-based operations (TBO) concept, which draws from a wide range of data sources to help controllers better understand where aircraft will be in the future. The idea behind TBO is to make scheduling less of a headache for air traffic management personnel and controllers.
Aviation Week quoted Fulton as saying that SMART will “sharpen” these trajectory predictions with the infusion of AI and cloud computing and will be “deconflicting the projected trajectories from each aircraft” to provide updated arrival times.
Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), told FLYING in April that, per his understanding, SMART will not actually separate aircraft.
“Humans will separate airplanes,” Daniels said. “Humans will be responsible for human lives. What we haven’t had is a system that helps us manage the national airspace system before the day even begins.”
Frank Matus, director of uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) integration for Thales, similarly said the idea of SMART is to reduce delays, cancellations, and schedule deviations rather than handle safety-critical functions performed by controllers. Thales is one of the three firms reported to be vying for the FAA’s SMART contract, alongside Palantir and Air Space Intelligence (ASI).
“What the agency is trying to do is figure out a way to do strategic deconfliction with schedules first, then look across the NAS [National Airspace System] to see which sectors of the airspace may be overloaded throughout the course of the day,” Matus said.
Matus added that the FAA envisions the system predicting airspace conditions anywhere from a few hours to six months into the future.
Officials reportedly view SMART less as a replacement for human output and more as a workload reduction tool, similar to other air traffic control modernization projects the agency is pursuing with $12.5 billion that Congress allocated last year. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has requested about $20 billion in additional funding that he said would cover the development and rollout of SMART and other software-oriented upgrades.
Readers can track progress on these upgrades using a website the Transportation Department launched in March.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford in April said the three SMART bidders had each created “true digital twins” of the NAS “that allows us to use predictive analytics to take in what will be future schedules.”
The agency has yet to award a contract, but The Air Current this week reported it is close to picking the smaller ASI over tech giants Thales and Palantir. ASI claims its Flyways AI system already manages more than 40 percent of U.S. air traffic, which officials may view favorably.
Sources told The Air Current that the award is not final and could change, though an FAA spokesperson said the contract would be announced “soon.”