The Federal Aviation Administration has picked a software company to build the brain of a new air traffic control system. The contract, worth $875 million, went to Air Space Intelligence. Twelve companies bid for the work.
The core of the deal is a piece of technology called SMART. That acronym stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories.
It is an artificial intelligence system. The AI will take in airline schedules, weather reports, airport capacity, airspace conditions, and operational constraints. Then it will predict traffic flows.
It will flag conflicts before they happen. That last part matters.
The FAA says its current system forces human controllers to juggle thousands of scheduling conflicts every day. Those conflicts turn into delays. Travelers feel the pain.
The new system is supposed to catch those problems on the ground, before planes push back from gates. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford described the scale of the problem. Air traffic professionals manage thousands of scheduling conflicts daily.
The result is delays for the traveling public. The new technologies from Air Space Intelligence, including the SMART system, are meant to ease that burden.
The contract covers more than just the SMART system. Air Space Intelligence will provide two complementary technologies. Both are designed to improve how flights are scheduled and managed across the National Airspace System.
One handles the predictive work. The other handles the operational side.
The FAA has said Flow Management Data and Services will serve as the new technological backbone of a modernized Air Traffic Control System Command Center. The announcement came Monday. The contract will run for a considerable number of years.
The dollar figure is $875 million. That is a large sum, even by federal contracting standards. The bid process drew a substantial number of companies.
Twelve firms competed for the work. One of them was Flow Management Data and Services.
That company lost the main contract but still got a role. The FAA says Flow Management Data and Services will provide the backbone technology for the command center. Air Space Intelligence is not a household name.
It is a software company. It builds systems for complex logistics and operations.
The FAA contract puts its technology inside the nerve center of U.S. air traffic control. The current system is old. It has been patched and upgraded for decades.
But it still relies on human controllers to spot conflicts and reroute traffic. The new system shifts that work to AI. The AI looks at the same data a human would see — schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions, operational constraints — but it does it faster and across a wider scope.
The FAA says the system will improve how airspace is managed before flights depart. That is the key.
If conflicts are caught early, planes can be rerouted before they are in the air. That reduces congestion. It eases the workload on controllers.
It cuts delays. The contract is a milestone.
It is the FAA’s largest single investment in software and AI for air traffic control. The agency has talked about modernization for years. This is the first concrete step toward a system that uses artificial intelligence to manage the flow of aircraft.
Whether the system works as advertised remains to be seen. The FAA has a history of troubled technology projects. But the agency is betting $875 million that this one will be different.
The traveling public will be watching.
