Did hiring loads of gamers not work out? The Federal Aviation Administration is now spending north of $875 million to deploy an AI-powered air traffic control tool, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The system, called SMART — short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories — automatically analyzes factors like airline schedules, weather patterns, and airport runway capacity to help streamline operations and point out any potential conflicts before they occur, according to an official release cited in the reporting.
It’s set to have a huge role. As the WSJ puts it, “when fully rolled out across US airspace, the software is supposed to act as something like the brains of the nation’s air-traffic control system.”
And no pressure to this potentially trailblazing experiment in AI in air traffic operations: it’s first being used in Washington, DC, one of the busiest stretches of airspace in the nation, as soon as Monday.
