The News
The FAA is moving to put artificial intelligence into one of the most demanding jobs in all of aviation: managing the traffic in America’s skies. The system is called SMART — Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories — and its job is to predict where the sky is about to get crowded before it happens.
Today, a controller typically gets around 15 minutes of warning about a developing traffic conflict. SMART is designed to push that prediction window out to roughly two hours — far enough ahead that a problem can be smoothed out before a plane has even pushed back from the gate. As of a June 13, 2026 report from The Air Current, a small Boston startup, Air Space Intelligence (ASI) — around 150 people — is the expected winner of the contract, beating out much larger rivals Palantir and Thales. Importantly, the FAA has stressed that it has not actually awarded anything yet, so treat the specific winner as expected-but-not-official until the FAA confirms it.
If ASI’s name sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same company behind Flyways, the flight-routing tool Alaska Airlines already uses to save fuel — a system we cover in our AI in Aerospace deep dive.
SMART isn’t a one-off. It sits inside a multibillion-dollar overhaul of the National Airspace System that also includes replacing hundreds of aging radar installations and, according to FAA modernization reporting, hiring more than 1,200 new air traffic controllers in fiscal year 2026.
Why It Matters
Air traffic control is a famously human job — fast spatial reasoning, judgment under pressure, and clear communication, all at once. So it’s worth being precise about what an AI like SMART does and doesn’t do.
It doesn’t fly the planes or replace the controller. It’s a decision-support tool: it watches the whole system, forecasts where flows will bunch up, and hands the controller more lead time to act. The human still makes the calls — they just get to make them earlier, with more options on the table and less last-minute scramble.
That’s the same pattern showing up across aerospace right now. AI is moving in as a co-pilot for human experts — predicting engine failures before they happen, optimizing routes, flagging the needle in the haystack — while the human stays responsible for the decision. For a student, the lesson is the one this whole site keeps coming back to: the people who thrive won’t be the ones AI replaces, they’ll be the ones who know how to work with it.
And the timing is unusually concrete. A system being chosen now, plus a federal push to hire 1,200+ controllers this year, means this isn’t a someday-career — it’s a hiring wave you could actually walk into.
Career Connection
- Air Traffic Control — the most direct connection. The job is shifting toward supervising AI-assisted traffic flow, so understanding tools like SMART is becoming part of the work itself. Our final pathway step, Understand AI in ATC, is built for exactly this moment — and the FAA’s current hiring surge makes it a real, near-term opportunity.
- Flight Dispatcher — dispatchers live in the world of strategic flow and routing, the same problems SMART is built to solve. The skills overlap, and AI-powered planning tools are already part of the job; see Use AI-Powered Dispatch Tools.
If you’re drawn to this work, the most useful thing you can build now isn’t coding skill alone — it’s the blend the FAA is hiring for: the spatial reasoning and calm-under-pressure of a controller, plus the comfort to trust, question, and double-check what an AI system is telling you.
Go Deeper
- AI in Aerospace: What’s Happening Now — including the air-traffic-management work already in service
- The Air Traffic Control pathway
- The Air Current’s reporting on the FAA’s AI air-traffic decision