Washington — Federal transportation officials are betting big on Boston tech to keep the nation’s skies moving.
The U.S. Department of Transportation announced Monday that it has tapped Boston-based Air Space Intelligence to lead a sweeping artificial intelligence overhaul of the country's air-traffic management system. The new software is designed to let the FAA predict bottlenecks, reroute flights and flag potential aircraft conflicts hours or even days before they would normally show up, a shift officials say could reshape day-to-day flight operations. The award is described as one of the most significant federal investments so far in operational AI for routine aviation.
Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford are framing the twin programs — Flow Management Data and Services (FMDS) and Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories (SMART) — as a kind of national control room that pulls together schedules, weather and capacity into a single operational picture, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The department says the integrated platform is meant to help agencies and airlines "proactively identify delays and available airspace" before problems ripple across the system and strand passengers.
Air Space Intelligence, for its part, is touting the scale of the deal. The company said in a release that the award is a 12-year, $875 million contract and that its Flyways AI platform will be expanded to support national operations, per PR Newswire. In that statement, ASI described FMDS and SMART as the “central nervous system” for the National Airspace System and emphasized that the government is expecting rapid deployment rather than a slow, bureaucratic rollout.
How SMART Will Work
SMART is essentially a cloud-based planning layer that runs the numbers long before a plane ever leaves the gate. It crunches airline schedules, weather patterns, airport capacity and real-world operational constraints to forecast traffic flows and recommend routes and departure times ahead of launch, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s one-page fact sheet says the goal is “zero delays at the start of the day” and notes that the agency is targeting initial operations this fall.
Why The Push Now
The timing is no accident. The award follows a string of high-profile incidents and ongoing capacity strains that have cranked up the pressure on Washington to modernize the system, including the March LaGuardia runway collision that killed two pilots and the January 2025 midair collision near Reagan National, according to E&E News. Officials and industry sources say the new software is meant to blunt the cascading delays that often follow those kinds of breakdowns and near-meltdowns in the network.
FAA and ASI officials are quick to stress that SMART is a decision-support tool, not a robot controller. Human air-traffic controllers will remain responsible for aircraft separation, and the agency has published a roadmap and other guidance aimed at steering safe AI adoption in aviation, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA says the new platform is intended to sit alongside existing systems, not replace them, and to streamline how data is shared between controllers, airlines and other operators.
DOT and ASI say they expect to kick off initial SMART operations this fall, then scale up over the next 12 to 24 months as FMDS moves in to replace decades-old software inside the FAA Command Center, per the U.S. Department of Transportation. If those timelines hold, travelers could start to feel the impact in the form of fewer weather and capacity-related cancellations and fewer domino-effect delays.
As the FAA pilots SMART this fall, the rollout will be watched closely by airlines, controller groups and safety advocates who want to see hard evidence of reduced delays without any erosion of safety margins. The next year will show whether an AI-backed “central nervous system” can really run quietly in the background at national scale, keeping flights on time without introducing new risks in some of the world’s busiest airspace.
