CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo said Friday that it was “just too much of a coincidence” that the Federal Aviation Administration was rolling out a new artificial intelligence air traffic tool just as a communications failure set off a nationwide ground stop.
The FAA halted departures at every airport in the country Friday afternoon “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” The move came after communication problems hit the Air Route Traffic Control Centers that manage high-altitude traffic between airports.
On CNN, Schiavo pointed to the FAA’s new system, SMART, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. It is a roughly $875 million AI tool meant to help manage air traffic.
“And I have to say, it’s a tremendous amount of coincidence that right now, I mean, that they announced that they were going to start doing this, particularly since one of the goals of the SMART system — it’s not that we don’t need this — we need this. But one of the goals of the SMART system was to manage the en route traffic,” Schiavo said.
“And so if they’re putting in new software now, this new SMART system, to start managing that. And now we have a communications outage,” she added. “I don’t know if they’re linked, but it’s just too much of a coincidence that they’re trying to start that moving today, and now we have problems with the en route system.”
Schiavo is a former Department of Transportation inspector general. She acknowledged that she did not know whether the two were connected.
Officials were careful not to rule anything out. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters there was “no indication as of yet” of a “nefarious attack” and blamed a telecommunications outage. But he said officials were looking into whether the AI-supported system played a part. Bloomberg later reported, citing a source, that the FBI is investigating whether a software update caused the outage and does not believe a cyberattack or criminal activity was to blame.
The FAA announced this week that it had expanded SMART across the national airspace system. The platform first launched in a limited mode around Washington, D.C., in September. Air Space Intelligence built it under a 12-year contract worth nearly $876 million. It pulls together about 200 data streams, including weather, flight paths, traffic flow and controller staffing, so the FAA can plan “hours, days and even weeks ahead.”
The FAA has said the tool does not fly planes or replace people. “SMART cannot be used to replace the critical role air traffic controllers play or take over control of an aircraft,” the agency has said. FAA staff are supposed to review its recommendations before acting on them.
The program has faced skepticism. Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer said the FAA “should not use my constituents as guinea pigs for an unproven AI air traffic control system.” The administration has promoted the tool as part of a broader $12.5 billion push to modernize the nation’s aging air traffic control system.
SMART’s debut in September was also overshadowed by a separate equipment failure. A fiber line cut by an Amtrak construction crew in New Jersey caused a telecom outage that snarled flights in the Northeast. That outage had nothing to do with SMART.
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