The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that it will begin using an artificial intelligence tool to better deal with flight delays, and D.C. local airports are the testing ground.
Reagan National Airport, Dulles International Airport and BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport will all start using the SMART system — It stands for Strategic Management of Airspace Routes and Trajectories.
“It gives us better information, better data to manage the airspace on behalf of the American people,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
At the DOT headquarters, Duffy showed how real-time information like weather, congestion at airports and flight paths can be adjusted to streamline the best paths in and out of airports.
“I want to be really clear, there’s been a lot of conversation about AI and who is controlling the airspace,” he said. “This is a predictive tool that will give a prompt to a human, to someone who is managing the airspace, but it’s always going to be a human that manages the airspace in America.”
He said the SMART tool has not been deployed anywhere else in the world, and DCA, IAD and BWI will be the first to use it.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford spoke on how this could help locally.
“You know, we think of Reagan as a highly constrained, slot controlled — there’s no more room at Reagan,” he said. “That’s actually not true. We’ve got significant inefficiencies here where we can better align capacity to demand.”
“This is what America has asked for,” Duffy said. “They said, ‘Hey, I’m sick of the experience that I have right now in America. I’m sick of the delays.’”
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association sent News4 a statement saying, “NATCA believes any new technology should complement and not replace the experience, training, and professional judgment of air traffic controllers who are responsible for the safety of the National Airspace System.”
Virginia Rep. Don Beyer, who is co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus and represents the district that includes DCA, released a statement Monday calling for the use of the AI system to be suspended.
“The FAA should not use my constituents as guinea pigs for an unproven AI air traffic control system. The safety of the 24 million people traveling through DCA each year must be the top priority,” he said. “Residents of this region are still uncertain about air safety after last year’s fatal accident, and the Administration did shockingly little to educate the traveling public about this development before implementing it in one of the most complex airspaces in the world.”
He went on to say he was informed that air traffic controllers were not consulted on the system’s design and development nor were they trained on using it before its implementation at the airports.
This new technology came from an $875 million contract to a Boston-based software company. It will be studied in the D.C. area, and the plan is to roll it out nationally by 2028.
