The shortage of air traffic controllers and the aging flight-control infrastructure in the United States has pushed the Federal Aviation Administration toward using artificial intelligence to improve the country's airspace management.
According to ITNA quoting Techspot, a new system called “Strategic Airspace Management, Routes and Track” - abbreviated SMART - is set to be launched first in Washington, D.C., and then gradually expanded across the United States.
SMART is a cloud platform that analyzes information related to flight schedules, weather conditions, airport capacity, and other operational factors. Its primary goal is to predict air traffic flow and identify the likelihood of conflicts or congestion on flight paths. One of the most important capabilities of this system is creating a shared information stream among airlines, air traffic controllers, and the Federal Aviation Administration; currently these parties often use different data and schedules.
The company “Airspace Intelligence,” which is developing SMART, has received a grant of $875 million from the Federal Aviation Administration for this project. The company hopes the new technology can reduce fuel consumption, speed up the return of flights to normal after storms or congestion, increase real-time awareness of airspace conditions, and create more capacity for new flights.
The need for such technology has been driven in part by the outdated air traffic control infrastructure in the United States. The FAA’s 2023 assessment showed that 37 percent of the agency’s systems are in poor condition in terms of reliability, and another 39 percent may face reliability issues in the future. Some of these systems are more than three decades old, and fully modernizing them could take years.
Meanwhile, staff shortages remain one of the aviation industry’s main problems in the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration ultimately intends to have 12,563 air traffic controllers, but the current workforce is about 11,000. Using artificial intelligence in such circumstances could take part of the information-processing burden off employees, although the stated goal is not to replace human controllers.