An Algorithm Is Now Helping Sequence Flights Into Washington

The Federal Aviation Administration began using an artificial intelligence tool in live operations on September 21, helping controllers manage traffic flows into the three airports serving the Washington region. The system, called SMART, is in limited operational use covering Ronald Reagan Washington National, Washington Dulles International and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall. It ingests weather patterns, traffic flow, airport capacity and other operational data, and then suggests routing and sequencing adjustments to the controllers handling arrivals and departures across some of the most congested and politically sensitive airspace in the country.

The rollout follows a twelve-year, $875 million contract awarded to Air Space Intelligence in June. The first phase is a test of roughly 90 days, intended to establish how well the tool performs before the agency decides on any wider deployment. Crucially, the described design keeps humans in charge: SMART proposes, controllers dispose. That distinction is doing a lot of work in the FAA’s public framing, and it is the distinction that will be scrutinised hardest, because nothing about air traffic control has historically been comfortable with recommendations arriving from a system nobody can fully interrogate in real time.

The context is a system under visible strain. The same Northeast corridor suffered a ground-equipment outage on September 21 that grounded flights across major airports, and staffing shortfalls have driven deliberate traffic reductions at several facilities over the past two years. Washington’s airspace is particularly awkward: three busy commercial airports inside a tight radius, layered over restricted zones and military traffic, with terrain and noise constraints shaping approach paths. If a routing tool can find spare minutes anywhere, this is the kind of place where the minutes exist.

For passengers the effect, if it works, should be invisible — marginally fewer holding patterns, slightly tighter arrival banks, fewer of the compounding delays that turn a weather event at National into a late evening at Dulles. What the trial will not fix is the underlying shortage of certified controllers, which no scheduling algorithm can manufacture. Expect the FAA to report on the 90-day window around the turn of the year, and expect the question of how much authority to hand a model to be argued over well past that.

Sources: The Washington Post, The Washington Times