The $875 million contract the FAA awarded this week to Air Space Intelligence did not materialize out of thin air. It is the product of years of mounting pressure on an air traffic control system that, by the agency’s own admission, is struggling to keep up. Twelve companies bid for the work.
That alone tells you something about the scale of the problem and the market’s appetite to fix it. The winner, Air Space Intelligence, will now build the technological backbone for the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center.
Flow Management Data and Services, another bidder, will serve as the new technological backbone of a modernized Command Center. The agency has not said which other firms threw their hats in the ring. The core of the upgrade is a piece of software called SMART — Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories.
It uses artificial intelligence to crunch airline schedules, weather data, airport capacity, airspace conditions and operational constraints. The goal: predict traffic flows and flag conflicts before they become delays.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford described the current situation in blunt terms. Air traffic professionals, he said, are handling thousands of scheduling conflicts every day. Those conflicts cascade into delays that ripple across the National Airspace System.
The traveling public feels the pain at the gate and on the tarmac. The contract runs for a considerable number of years. That is a long commitment to a single vendor for a system that will sit at the nerve center of U.S. aviation.
The FAA is betting that AI can do what human controllers, working with older tools, cannot: see the bottlenecks coming far enough in advance to actually do something about them. This is not the agency’s first attempt at modernization.
Past efforts have been plagued by cost overruns, missed deadlines and technology that was outdated before it went live. The NextGen program, launched in the mid-2000s, was supposed to move air traffic control from radar to satellite-based tracking. It has made progress, but the system remains a patchwork of old and new.
The SMART system is designed to operate before flights even depart. That is a shift in thinking.
Instead of reacting to congestion as it builds, the FAA wants to shape demand in advance — adjusting schedules, rerouting planes, smoothing out the peaks before they become gridlock. Air Space Intelligence will provide two complementary technologies, but the FAA has not detailed the second one. The contract value — $875 million — suggests both are substantial pieces of work.
The timing matters. Air travel demand has rebounded sharply since the pandemic, and the system is straining under the weight. Controller staffing shortages have been a persistent headache.
The FAA has been scrambling to hire and train new controllers, but that takes years. Software, at least in theory, can be deployed faster.
Whether SMART will deliver on its promise is an open question. AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on, and the National Airspace System generates an enormous amount of it. Weather forecasts change.
Airlines change their schedules. Airports close runways for maintenance.
The software will have to handle all of that in real time. The FAA has not said when the new system will go live. Given the history of such projects, skepticism is warranted.
But the agency is under pressure to show results. Passengers are tired of sitting on tarmacs. Airlines are tired of burning fuel in holding patterns.
And the controllers themselves — the ones managing those thousands of daily conflicts — are tired of working around the limits of a system that has not kept pace.
