Airlines Tell Congress: The Data-Sharing Problem Is Bigger Than the Tech

The FAA got its splashy AI contract last week when ASI was awarded the 12-year, $875M SMART and FMDS deal — a story I covered here on June 22. But what happened on Capitol Hill two days later arguably says just as much about where airline flight operations technology actually needs to go.

What the Senate Heard on June 23

Senator Jerry Moran led a Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing with aviation industry leaders to examine recent near collisions and runway incursion incidents, with a particular focus on reviewing safety technology implementation, runway safety programs, and FAA modernization efforts. The immediate impetus was a string of unsettling incidents: within nine days, a skydiving aircraft crashed near Butler, Missouri, killing all twelve aboard; a B-52 went down near Edwards Air Force Base; a Marine Corps F/A-18D crashed southeast of Seattle; and most recently, a runway incursion at Boston Logan forced a Delta flight to execute an emergency go-around after ATC cleared an American Airlines aircraft into its landing path.

But the more durable thread running through the hearing wasn’t any single incident — it was data. Airlines for America CEO Chris Sununu urged Congress to build on a $12.5 billion down payment toward ATC modernization, while witnesses said better information sharing could help identify risks earlier across airlines, airports, pilots, controllers, and other aviation stakeholders. That’s a meaningful signal. The industry isn’t just asking for new radar or faster fiber — it’s asking for a more connected operational picture, one where anomalies surface across the whole system before they cascade into close calls.

Why This Matters for Flight Ops Tech

The SMART system, which uses data to analyze airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions, and operational constraints to predict traffic flows and identify potential conflicts, has airlines privately expressing concerns about how the FAA will decide which flights need to be moved when conflicts arise — and whether the fall 2026 deployment timeline is realistic. Those concerns didn’t disappear once the contract was signed. If anything, the Senate hearing put them in sharper relief.

Having spent years on the delivery and deployment side of aviation software programs, I’ve seen this tension play out before: a genuinely capable system goes live before the data plumbing — the integrations, the feeds, the agreements about who owns what signal — is ready to support it. The technology works in isolation but struggles to deliver value in a live operational environment where everyone is still figuring out what to share with whom and under what conditions. On the fall 2026 timeline specifically, I think it could be realistic depending on how narrowly the initial deployment scope is defined, but because SMART represents a genuinely new kind of program, some slippage seems likely as the FAA and its partners work through all the operational nuts and bolts. Novel programs of this scale almost always surface integration complexity that wasn’t fully visible at contract award.

The hearing specifically examined the implementation of safety technologies, runway safety programs, and FAA modernization efforts, with witnesses expected to discuss opportunities for improved safety coordination between aviation stakeholders and the federal government. That framing — coordination, not just technology — is the right one. ADS-B In, SMART, FMDS, and the broader infrastructure overhaul being managed by prime integrator Peraton are all tools. But tools don’t share data. Organizations do, and getting commercial airlines, the military, general aviation operators, and the FAA onto a common information framework is a governance challenge as much as a technical one.

When the hearing witnesses flagged information-sharing as the priority, I don’t think they were wrong — but I’d push back gently on the framing if it implies this is a problem with a clean fix. Information sharing is genuinely important, and the more of it the system can support, the better the outcomes. But it’s also a complex and nuanced topic that will have to be worked out incrementally over time, through negotiation, trust-building, and careful definition of what data gets shared with whom and for what purpose. In some ways, calling it an “information-sharing problem” can make it sound more tractable than it is. What’s really being described is a deep interoperability challenge that cuts across organizational boundaries, regulatory jurisdictions, and competitive interests — and that kind of challenge doesn’t resolve itself simply because everyone agrees it matters.

The Broader ATC Modernization Stack

It’s useful to step back and look at how the pieces fit together right now. Peraton has been appointed prime integrator for a major overhaul of the ATC system, supported by a $12.5 billion initial investment through the One Big Beautiful Bill and targeting delivery of a state-of-the-art system by the end of 2028. On top of that foundation, ASI is building the AI-powered traffic management layer with SMART and FMDS. And sitting underneath all of it are the data-sharing and information-flow gaps that the Senate hearing made visible this week.

The June 23 hearing also addressed the significant challenges to widespread ADS-B In adoption, including the FAA’s certification processes, supply chain limitations, maintenance capacity, and the varying requirements of different aircraft types — challenges that matter because ADS-B In data is, for many of these AI-driven traffic management systems, a primary input. If the sensor layer is incomplete, the intelligence built on top of it is only as good as what it can see. I’d say the barriers to broader ADS-B In adoption aren’t really reducible to a single root cause. Depending on the operator and the use case, you’re looking at a mix of technology readiness issues, regulatory friction, and economic incentive problems — and the relative weight of each shifts considerably depending on whether you’re talking about a major airline, a regional carrier, or a general aviation operator trying to justify an avionics upgrade. There isn’t one lever to pull here.

What the hearing clarified is that the U.S. isn’t building one modernization project. It’s trying to coordinate several overlapping ones — infrastructure, AI software, sensing technology, and data governance — simultaneously and at speed. Whether that coordination actually happens at the pace the administration is projecting is the real question worth watching.

The Senate hearing was a useful reality check, not a rebuke of the direction. The direction looks right. The sequencing is where I’d want to probe further.

Sources

• Close Calls: Improving Safety Across the National Airspace System — Senate Commerce Committee
• Chairman Moran Leads Hearing to Examine Recent Close Calls & Efforts to Ensure Aviation Safety
• “Hundreds” Of Near Misses In US Airspace Every Day, Airlines For America CEO Tells Congress — Simple Flying
• Get SMART: FAA Picks ASI for Predictive Air Traffic Management — FLYING Magazine
• ASI Selected by FAA to Modernize the National Airspace System — PR Newswire