The Federal Aviation Administration began limited operations of SMART on September 21 in the Washington airspace that serves Reagan National, Dulles, and Baltimore/Washington — an $875 million bet that prediction can cut delays without handing the sky to software.
SMART, for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, sits inside the Flow Management Data and Services platform. It pulls together about 200 data streams — weather, trajectories, schedules, airport capacity, and controller staffing — and flags congestion hours or days ahead so managers can reroute or thin flows before a thunderstorm becomes a national ground stop. Air Space Intelligence of Boston won a 12-year contract in June 2026. Broader deployment is aimed at around 2028.
The agency is explicit about what the tool is not. It does not separate aircraft, does not replace controllers, and does not fly the plane. Recommendations go to specialists first. That caveat is also an admission: the delay crisis is a capacity and staffing problem that a dashboard cannot staff. Starting in the capital's three-airport tangle, the most politically watched airspace in the country, is a way to show results where members of Congress live.
The second-order risk is institutional. If SMART's forecasts become the default, a missed storm cell or a bad staffing input will not look like a model error. It will look like an FAA decision. Predictive tools in safety-critical bureaucracies tend to migrate from advice to obligation. The rollout will be judged not on whether it is "AI," but on whether the evening arrival bank at Reagan still melts when the weather turns.
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