FAA launches $875M SMART tool, claims its highest staffing in a decade

The press release the Federal Aviation Administration used to launch its $875 million AI scheduling tool also claims the agency has “reached our highest staffing levels in a decade, with approximately 11,000 controllers currently in our towers”. The Government Accountability Office published its own count nine months before the launch and reached a different conclusion. Its December 2025 report found 13,164 controllers at the end of fiscal 2025, “about 6 percent fewer than in 2015”. The write-ups we checked didn’t mention the gap.

SMART, which stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, went live in limited mode on Monday, September 21, in the airspace around Washington. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford unveiled it that day. FedScoop reported the initial coverage spans Baltimore/Washington International, Dulles and Reagan National.

The FAA says SMART centralises 200 data streams, including weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow and controller staffing metrics, then predicts where congestion will form. That’s the mechanism: the agency moves from reacting to bottlenecks to scheduling around them hours, days or weeks ahead. The money behind it is a 12 year contract awarded in June to Boston-based Air Space Intelligence, which put the value at “$875 Million” in its own announcement. FedScoop wrote “nearly $876 million”, so the contractor’s figure is the one to use.

The staffing claim matters because it’s the justification for spending on software instead of people. The two counts aren’t defined the same way, and that’s the first thing to say about them. The FAA’s number describes controllers “in our towers” on an unstated date. GAO’s number counts controllers employed at the close of fiscal 2025 against a stated 2015 baseline of 14,007, which is what makes “in a decade” testable at all.

Source	Count	Period	Direction
FAA release, 21 Sep 2026	approx 11,000	“currently”, in towers	Highest in a decade
GAO-26-107320	13,164	End of fiscal 2025	Down 6% from 14,007 in 2015

GAO’s other figures point the same way. Flights using the system rose about 10 percent between fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2024, from 28.1 million to 30.8 million. Of everyone who applied under a Track 1 hiring announcement between fiscal 2017 and 2022, about 4 percent completed every hiring step and started at the FAA Academy. That report’s own title says the FAA should establish goals and better assess its hiring processes, which means its remedy was a hiring one rather than a software one.

On what the tool actually does, the release is narrower than the framing around it. SMART “cannot be used to replace the critical role air traffic controllers play or take over control of an aircraft”, it says, and every recommendation is reviewed by FAA staff, with local leadership at each facility free to accept or pass on the scheduling suggestions. Duffy put it more plainly at the launch.

It’s always going to be a human that manages the airspace in America. This tool won’t manage airspace, but it gives us better information, better data to manage the airspace.

Sean Duffy, US Transportation Secretary, via FedScoop

So the human stays in the loop by design, which is the reassuring version and also the load-bearing assumption. The catch is that human review isn’t free of its own failure modes, and a Hugging Face paper we covered argued AI agents degrade the humans meant to oversee them. Regulators are already reaching automated decisions directly, which is how a Dutch regulator came to fine Uber over automated driver deactivations.

Even so, the contractor disclosed one number the write-ups skipped. Bernard Asare, its president of civil aviation, said the company had “invested nearly $100 million of our own resources” building the platform before the award. The release also describes its existing Flyways product as covering “a substantial share of U.S. domestic air travel”, while the company’s product page claims it affects “over a million air travelers daily”. Ars Technica reported a firmer claim of over 40 percent of all US air traffic, which we could not find on either page.

That gap is what one former insider is watching. Philip Mann, a principal consultant at Vector Strategic Consulting who spent 17 years at the FAA, told Ars the limited launch was the right call because “every cut in scope shrinks the unknowns”. He’s watching whether expansion is gated on performance under real workload rather than demonstration conditions, and whether anyone has written down who owns the outcome when a prediction is wrong. He also wants to know if the rollout is still capped at 24,000 feet and above, as the FAA described in June.

Air Space Intelligence expects SMART and the underlying Flow Management Data and Services system to deploy over 12 to 24 months. TechCrunch reported the Washington rollout first, citing a one-page readout describing SMART as “a cloud-based platform system that enhances existing FAA air traffic management systems”. The number worth tracking through that window isn’t delay minutes. It’s whether the controller count moves toward GAO’s 14,007 baseline or stays where GAO found it.