WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is expanding its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories (SMART) system to airspace managed by all 22 FAA centers, extending a traffic-planning tool first used in the Washington region in September.
The agency’s November 10 expansion statement says the cloud-based platform combines 200 data streams, including weather, flight paths, traffic flows and controller staffing. The announcement describes national coverage without providing a center-by-center implementation timetable.
Since SMART began on September 21, the FAA says it has helped reroute 180 flights, saving an average of ten minutes and almost 80 US gal of fuel per flight. These are agency-reported results for the flights described, not a measured reduction in delays across the national system.
Recommendations Pass Through People
FAA specialists at the SMART center in Washington analyze and validate the data, then send scheduling recommendations to the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Warrenton, Virginia. The Command Center passes them to individual facilities for local leadership to consider.
The FAA’s September launch announcement says facilities can accept or decline those suggestions. It also says SMART cannot take over control of an aircraft or replace controllers.
The program fact sheet describes a planning layer alongside existing systems. Its artificial intelligence analyzes schedules, airport capacity, weather and other constraints to identify conflicts before departure, updating forecasts as conditions change. Air traffic controllers retain responsibility for keeping aircraft separated.
The FAA selected Air Space Intelligence in June to supply SMART and Flow Management Data and Services (FMDS). The contract announcement describes FMDS as the Command Center’s future technology backbone, with SMART as an enhancement within it. The November expansion therefore concerns a particular planning capability, rather than completion of the broader modernization program.
What Changes for Airlines
The national scope advances the planned Washington-area deployment Airways reported on in September. For airlines, the intended benefit is earlier agreement with the FAA on routes and departure times when demand, weather and available capacity conflict. Earlier warning gives planners more opportunity to change a flight before it joins a queue or encounters congestion.
Oversight questions accompanied the initial rollout. In an October 9 call for a pause, Senator Chris Van Hollen and House colleagues sought information on safety testing, consultation, training and standards for expansion. Their questions concern the evaluation process; they are not a finding that SMART caused an operational failure.
The November statement does not explain how the savings were calculated, provide a comparison baseline or report how often facilities accepted recommendations. Those details would help distinguish useful individual reroutes from a sustained improvement in airline reliability. Tracking delay minutes, cancellations and recovery during comparable weather events would give airlines and passengers a clearer test of what nationwide use delivers.
Historical file photo of controllers at Washington ARTCC. Capture date unrecorded; uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2007. Photo: FAA/public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Historical file photo of controllers at Washington ARTCC. Capture date unrecorded; uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2007. Photo: FAA/public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
