FAA's SMART Rollout Targets Congestion Before Aircraft Leave the Gate

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) plans to begin fielding software this month that is meant to predict congestion in the National Airspace System before aircraft leave the gate, moving part of the agency's delay management ahead of departure rather than after the system has already filled up.

Administrator Bryan Bedford met September 10 with senior executives from American Airlines (AA), United Airlines (UA), Delta Air Lines (DL), Southwest Airlines (WN) and other carriers to go through the plan, Reuters reported that the agency intends to start the rollout this month. Airlines for America (A4A), the trade group that convened the meeting, said the program "will have a direct positive effect on American travelers."

The system is called Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories, or SMART. The FAA treats it as an enhancement inside a larger platform, Flow Management Data and Services (FMDS), that is to replace the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS) running today at the agency's Air Traffic Control System Command Center.

What the Software Is Supposed to Do

The FAA says SMART will read airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions and operational constraints together and without pause, then use the combination to project where traffic will bunch and where flights will conflict before either happens. What the agency wants out of it is a single demand picture that it, the airlines and other operators can work from when they settle routes and departure and arrival times in advance.

Today's operation has "a limited ability to anticipate the effects of the number and timing of forecasted flights" and of unplanned events such as weather and runway closures, the FAA said when it awarded the work. "We react to, rather than predict, these constraints, resulting in bottlenecks throughout the day, which have ripple effects throughout the entire country." The data controllers rely on, from weather patterns to airport capacity, sits in separate systems, and the agency said controllers often work across numerous screens and spreadsheets to reach it.

Both systems sit in traffic flow management, the Command Center function that balances demand against the actual capacity of the airspace and airports rather than handling individual flights.

The first application is narrower than the long-term description. The FAA plans to use SMART initially to reschedule flights cancelled by bad weather more effectively, and its use could later be expanded to coordinating schedules and trajectories before aircraft depart, according to Reuters. The two timeframes in circulation are not the same: the rollout Bedford discussed with the carriers begins this month, while the agency's own announcement put initial operations in the fall.

The Existing Pre-Departure Toolkit

When convective weather or a runway closure cuts capacity now, the Command Center reaches for ground delay programs, ground stops, airspace flow programs and required reroutes. Each of those allocates a shortage that already exists.

One existing instrument does let operators state preferences before departure. Under the Collaborative Trajectory Options Program, a carrier submits a trajectory options set ranking alternative routes, altitudes and the ground delay it is willing to accept for a given flight, and the automation assigns the most preferred option available. The FAA published operator guidance for the program in 2014.

SMART is aimed at a different scope. Rather than a program built around one constrained area on one bad afternoon, the FAA describes a continuous national demand picture that carriers and traffic managers work from before the schedule is flown. Whether airlines will accept pre-departure changes to flights they have already sold is a commercial question the software does not settle.

Why the Program Moved Now

Congress required a TFMS replacement in the 2024 FAA Reauthorization. The FAA opened a vendor challenge in September 2025, when Bedford said the new program "will replace current technology that is decades-old and struggling with performance and maintainability issues." The procurement sits inside the broader rebuild Airways covered when the department set out its three-year plan for a new air traffic control system.

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and Bedford named Air Space Intelligence (ASI) as the vendor on June 22, 2026, roughly nine months after the challenge opened. Chris Sununu, CEO of Airlines for America, said in the FAA's announcement that "a program of this kind has been talked about for decades, and this administration is finally taking action."

The award is worth US$875m over 12 years, the Boston company and Reuters both reported, with SMART and FMDS deployed over the following 12 to 24 months and initial SMART operations targeted for this fall. ASI says its technology is already in operational use at Alaska Airlines (AS), Delta and United.

The Operating Backdrop

The FAA has spent 2026 rationing capacity at two of its most congested hub systems, for different stated reasons.

In April the agency limited Chicago O'Hare (ORD) to 2,708 daily operations from May 17 through October 24, 2026, against the more than 3,080 flights carriers had planned for peak days. The FAA pointed to overscheduling, constrained gate capacity and taxiway closures from construction, and said less than 60% of arrivals and departures at the airport were on time the previous summer.

In June it extended operating limits at Newark Liberty (EWR) by a year, through October 30, 2027, holding the airport to 72 scheduled operations per hour. That order is explicitly staffing-driven. Area C at the Philadelphia terminal radar approach control facility, which works Newark traffic, had 28 certified professional controllers against a target of 46, and the agency said it does not expect to reach the target before the end of the Summer 2027 scheduling season. Arrival on-time performance at Newark sat at 75% even under the existing limits. Those two actions remove flights to protect the ones that remain, and SMART is the agency's attempt to recover capacity a different way, by finding usable airspace and workable departure times before demand outruns them.

What Is Not Settled

United CEO Scott Kirby said the system "has the potential to significantly reduce delays and cancellations during weather events," which describes an expectation rather than a measured result. The FAA and ASI materials reviewed for this article contain no measurement of SMART's effect on delays or cancellations, and no national-scale demonstration of the performance claims.

Bedford is scheduled to testify next week before a U.S. House appropriations subcommittee on the status of the US$12.5bn air traffic control overhaul, and the FAA is seeking another US$10bn, Reuters reported.

The agency's delivery record is the other variable. In a March 2025 review of air traffic control systems, the Government Accountability Office reported that the FAA had deemed 51 of its 138 air traffic control systems unsustainable, and that as of May 2024, completion dates for planned investments in the systems GAO flagged as especially concerning were at least six to 10 years away. Those are replacement programs already under way rather than FMDS, and ASI's target for SMART and FMDS is deployment over 12 to 24 months inside a contract that runs 12 years.

The FAA has said it plans to begin initial operations this fall. The materials reviewed for this article do not set out which Command Center functions move to FMDS first, or how SMART's pre-departure recommendations will sit alongside the ground delay programs and reroutes traffic managers will keep using in the meantime.