FAA's New SMART Air Traffic System Uses AI to Cut Flight Delays

Everyone has lived some version of the same scene. You are camped out at a gate with a dying phone, the departure board flips from "on time" to "delayed," and nobody working the desk can tell you why it happened or when it ends. On Monday, the US government said it wants AI to make that scene rarer, starting with the airspace over Washington, D.C., where the new SMART air traffic system goes live first.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that airports around the capital have begun using a tool called SMART, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. It uses AI to predict weather and other disruptions so flight managers can keep planes moving instead of stacking them over the airport. The rollout is a 90-day pilot, and if it performs, the SMART air traffic system will spread to other airports across the country over the coming months.

Reuters reported Monday that the Federal Aviation Administration has begun using the software-based system, which relies on predictive analytics to improve how flights are managed. The FAA awarded an $875 million contract over 12 years to Air Space Intelligence, the Boston company that built the software, and plans to gradually expand the SMART air traffic system beyond Washington.

How the SMART system actually works

Right now, much of the work runs on old-fashioned inputs. According to the New York Post, the current setup typically relies on old-fashioned paper maps of flight routes and a mix of static datasets covering weather, departure times, and arrival times. The SMART air traffic system replaces that with about 200 data streams feeding into one unified platform, updated in real time.

The practical difference is prediction. The system can project how a storm might delay a flight and give managers a live picture of how to route around it. If the model sees three flights headed for the same runway at the same moment, managers can ask pilots to adjust speed or change their flight path ahead of time. That should cut down on the holding patterns where planes circle an airport burning fuel while they wait for a lane to clear.

FAA administrator Bryan Bedford called it a "traffic separation tool" and said the real gain is being able to look at the whole airspace holistically, across an entire day rather than minute by minute. He also drew a clear line around what it is not: not a safety system, more of an advisory one. Air traffic managers handle the big picture of flight traffic; controllers still handle preventing collisions in real time. The SMART air traffic system sits on the manager side of that divide.

Why Washington airports get it first

Officials picked the DC area, which covers Ronald Reagan Washington National, Dulles International, and Baltimore/Washington International airports. When the Post asked Duffy why those airports were first, he joked that improving the travel experience for members of Congress would make it easier to get more money to finish the modernization job.

The SMART air traffic system is debuting in what officials call a limited mode, meaning they will be slow to adjust flights based on its recommendations while the team builds confidence in the data. Duffy said travelers should not expect a dramatically different experience by Christmas, but he believes real reductions in delays and cancellations could arrive by next summer. His pitch to reporters was characteristically big: "You are about to see the most advanced air traffic management system, not just in America, but it's the most advanced in the whole world."

Duffy also tried to head off the obvious anxiety about letting software anywhere near the sky. "We are not outsourcing aviation to AI," he said, adding that "humans control the airspace, humans make decisions, but we're just getting way better technology, way better foresight." He even joked about calling the tool "dumb AI," a clumsy joke with a serious point: SMART will not be making air traffic decisions on its own. It just hands human managers better information, including predictive data, to make the calls themselves.

Where the money comes from

The $875 million contract covers the SMART air traffic system and one more similar system, and the money traces back to the $12.5 billion set aside in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for overhauling air traffic infrastructure. The Trump administration has pushed the modernization hard since the collision at Reagan National last year, and the Post noted that this pilot is part of that wider effort.

One piece of timing worth knowing: the tool that suffered a busted circuit and caused scores of flight delays across the Northeast on Monday is a different system entirely. Bedford said SMART is not the system that failed. It is a manager advisory tool, not the equipment that controllers depend on to keep planes separated.

In theory, the payoff goes beyond shorter delays. If planes spend less time circling and waiting on the ground, airlines burn less fuel, which should lower travel costs and cut carbon emissions at the same time. Duffy put it plainly: "You're going to be on the airfield much faster. Your airline is going to use less fuel."

Whether it delivers depends on the 90-day pilot in Washington. The idea itself is simple enough: replace paper charts and stale spreadsheets with a live forecast of the sky, and give the people running it enough warning to fix problems before they strand thousands of passengers. If you have ever refreshed a flight tracker at midnight hoping a two-hour delay would melt away, you know why a system that sees trouble coming is worth trying.

For context on just how bad delays can get when the system fails, O'Hare recently saw a record single day of delays. And if you want another sign of how fast AI is landing in everyday travel, an AI photo posing coach built by former TikTok staff just launched too. The SMART air traffic system matters more, but the pattern is the same: software is rewriting the parts of trips that used to be decided by gut instinct and paper.