Duffy says FAA’s new AI air traffic tool played no role in nationwide ground stops
The Federal Aviation Administration said it expanded a new artificial intelligence-based air traffic management tool to all of its 22 air traffic control centers three days before ordering a nationwide ground stop on departing flights.
The tool, Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART, aims to shift air traffic management from a reactive to a predictive approach, the FAA said.
It merges approximately 200 data streams, such as flight paths, schedules, weather, airport capacity and controller personnel, onto a single platform to anticipate demand, weather and airspace constraints hours, days or weeks in advance.
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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a White House briefing Friday evening that SMART was not connected to the agency’s main radar and flight tracking systems and that there was “no possibility” that could have affected the outage.
Earlier Friday, Mr. Duffy asked Congress to provide $50 billion in emergency funding to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system, including what he described as routers overloaded with data.
“This is an emergency,” Mr. Duffy said. “We have old switches, old routers. It’s an old system that’s broken down, broken down everywhere.”
SEE ALSO: FAA lifts ground control after all flights across US halted due to telecommunications outage
He said the problem created “intermittent” communications and radar outages.
Air Space Intelligence, the technology company behind the SMART system, said Friday evening that the new system did not cause the ground shutdown.
“The current ground stop is not based on or the result of the SMART system, any ASI product or our integration with the FAA and ATC,” he said.
The FAA grounded departing traffic from all U.S. airports for approximately five hours “due to extraordinary circumstances and for safety reasons,” according to an FAA advisory.
Mr. Duffy said the communications problem affected all air traffic control centers and that FAA technicians were investigating.
The FAA said SMART recommends quickly changing routes or schedules to help flights avoid bad weather or congestion, with the goal of reducing delays and saving fuel. Since a partial launch Sept. 21, the agency said it has rerouted 180 flights, saving an average of about 10 minutes and nearly 80 gallons of fuel per flight.
FAA specialists review each recommendation and local facility managers can accept or reject them, the agency said. Controllers remain responsible for maintaining aircraft separation.
SMART was first used in the airspace around Reagan National, Dulles International and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall airports in the Washington area. It is being built by Air Space Intelligence under a 12-year, $875 million contract awarded in June that also covers an associated data platform.
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