FAA turns to $875 million AI platform to ease air traffic controller shortage

The Federal Aviation Administration is placing a large bet on artificial intelligence to relieve a persistent shortage of air traffic controllers. According to TechCrunch, the agency will soon launch SMART, an automated software platform built by a firm called Air Space Intelligence, in a deal that The Wall Street Journal reports is worth $875 million over 12 years.

What SMART is designed to do

SMART stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories. A one-page description of the program, cited by TechCrunch, characterizes it as a cloud-based platform that sits on top of the FAA's existing air traffic management systems rather than replacing them.

The software applies AI to a broad set of inputs, including airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions and other operational constraints, in order to forecast how traffic will flow and to flag potential conflicts before they develop. TechCrunch reports that the expectation is for the system to help controllers manage their workloads and route flights more safely at a moment when there are not enough controllers to meet demand.

A 12-year commitment

The Wall Street Journal puts the total cost to the government at $875 million spread across 12 years. The rollout will begin in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area before expanding to other regions.

The length of the contract signals that this is not a short experiment. The agency is committing to a commercial software product on a timescale normally associated with major infrastructure programs, meaning the Washington-area deployment will serve as an early, closely watched test of whether the technology delivers on its promise.

Part of a wider push

The software deal lands amid broader activity at the agency. Earlier this year, the FAA announced an ambitious hiring plan that it said would resolve the long-standing staffing shortfall in the controller workforce. Separately, the government is engaged in a wide-ranging effort to modernize the country's aging air traffic control systems.

TechCrunch notes that the causes of the controller shortage are varied, and that the government has signaled openness to novel solutions. SMART appears to be one of the most expensive of those solutions so far.

Why it matters

The controller shortage is simultaneously a safety question and a capacity constraint on the entire US aviation system. If SMART performs as described, AI-assisted prediction and conflict detection could allow a smaller workforce to handle the same volume of traffic, or more, which amounts to an acknowledgment that hiring alone is unlikely to fix the problem quickly.

The deal is also a marker for how AI is moving into safety-critical government infrastructure. Air traffic management leaves very little room for error, and the FAA is effectively wagering that a commercial AI product can be layered onto legacy systems without introducing new risks. The 12-year duration means the agency will live with this decision for a long time, and the quality of the early rollout will shape how quickly similar AI tools are adopted elsewhere in aviation and beyond.