The US Federal Aviation Administration on Monday, September 22, 2026, activated SMART, an AI-enhanced air-traffic management tool, at the three main airports serving Washington, D.C. — Ronald Reagan Washington National, Dulles International and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall.
200 Data Streams, One AI Predictive Layer
SMART ingests 200 centralised data streams — from weather feeds and airline schedules to airspace flow measures and airport surface movement — and applies machine-learning models to predict congestion, forecast delays and recommend proactive scheduling adjustments to human controllers. The system does not replace controllers; it sits alongside them as a decision-support layer that flags problems earlier than a person could triangulate them.
$875 Million Platform Cost, DC First Then Nationwide
The $875 million platform is being rolled out at the National Capital Region first because its three airports share overlapping airspace with more day-to-day complexity per operation than almost anywhere in the US. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy briefed the initiative and framed SMART as the leading edge of the FAA's broader AI-first modernisation.
What The Tool Is Solving
US aviation has suffered years of chronic delays, with weather cascades in the Northeast routinely propagating into hundreds of downstream cancellations. SMART is designed to catch a developing traffic-flow problem earlier, when a controller can still route around it, rather than after aircraft have already stacked up. A national rollout is planned once DC performance data validates the model.
Context
The launch is one of the highest-profile examples of production-grade AI hitting critical infrastructure, and follows aviation industry moves toward autonomy documented on the TheRoboticsMedia Autonomous Vehicles desk. It also complements adjacent hardware efforts such as Otto Aerospace's Phantom 3500.
Reporting based on coverage from Quartz, The Washington Post and Spectrum Local News.