The FAA's SMART System Is More Than an ATC Tool — It's Asking Airlines to Rethink How Dispatchers Work
A quick note to flag this is a follow-up to the post I published here on June 22 on the FAA’s $875M SMART contract award to Air Space Intelligence. What’s changed: Aviation Week reported additional deployment details this week — drawn from remarks by FAA Senior Certification Advisor Steve Fulton at the FAA/EASA annual safety conference on June 15 — that meaningfully shift how this story reads from a flight ops perspective.
A “Bounded” Start That Still Has Big Implications
The SMART system’s first operational demonstration, still targeted for this September, will be a “bounded introduction,” limited to air traffic at 24,000 feet and above. That framing is deliberately modest — the FAA is essentially telling the industry it’s not flipping every switch at once. But the ambition underneath it is worth reading carefully.
Fulton compared SMART to FAA’s trajectory-based operations enhanced with AI and cloud computing “to sharpen predictions of where the airplanes will be in space and time.” SMART is seen as further enhancement, not a human replacement. The goal, as Fulton described it, is to shift air traffic controllers into a role that looks more like modern flight deck management: “Doing that for air traffic controllers has not been possible because we’ve kept our humans in a real-time, integration-of-information mode." That’s a candid acknowledgment that the current system isn’t so much broken as it is architecturally stuck. SMART is the attempt to unstick it.
The analogy Fulton is drawing — that SMART does for controllers what modern flight deck automation did for pilots, moving them from real-time information integrators to supervisors — is one I think holds up reasonably well. Controllers are genuinely overdue for a digital overhaul of that kind, and the cognitive shift involved isn’t unlike what happened when the glass cockpit changed how pilots related to their aircraft. From time spent on the vendor side of airline systems integration, I know how hard it is to change deeply embedded workflows even when the underlying technology is solid. The controller-side transition is one challenge. The airline-side implications are the part I think is getting underreported.
What This Actually Requires From Airlines
“We’re using connectivity with the aircraft through a variety of options,” Fulton said. “We can push through airborne reroute but we’re respecting the authority of the controller. But those are the types of details we’re working out with our industry partners, how they want us to connect to their airplanes."
That sentence deserves more attention than it’s getting. SMART isn’t just a tool that runs quietly in an FAA data center. If it’s generating reroutes and pushing them toward aircraft, then airline Operations Control Centers are going to need to receive, evaluate, and act on that data stream in a structured, consistent way. That’s a dispatch workflow question as much as an ATC question. Airlines will need to think about how SMART’s outputs interact with their own flight planning systems, their existing reroute procedures, and how dispatchers prioritize AI-generated recommendations arriving from two directions: their own internal tools and now a government system.
Whether that amounts to a manageable incremental workflow change or something closer to a deeper operational redesign is genuinely unclear at this stage — it depends on how the system actually behaves in practice, and we won’t really know until it’s running. The architecture of what airlines are already managing is complex enough that adding a structured government-sourced data stream isn’t trivial, even if the concept is straightforward.
SMART is designed to help “the FAA, airlines, and operators align on the most efficient routes and departure and arrival times, improving efficiency, predictability, and system-wide performance." That’s a collaborative data model, but collaboration requires integration, and integration requires readiness on both sides of the transaction.
The Pace Question
Perhaps the most telling detail in this week’s reporting: Fulton acknowledged some stakeholders are concerned the FAA’s pace is too brisk. “It’s not often you hear industry say to the FAA, ‘You’re going too fast,’ but we’re getting that from our operator partners as we’re working with them to be able to deploy this in September."
That’s not a small admission. Airlines and aviation operators typically push regulators to move faster, not slower. When you hear the reverse, it’s worth asking what it actually signals. Given the already complex technological environment airlines are managing across their OCCs and flight planning systems, I think the more likely explanation is a genuine integration concern rather than posturing — operators aren’t usually in the business of asking for more time unless the work to be done is real. ASI has said both technologies will be fully deployed in the next 24 months, so the September demonstration is explicitly a validation step, not a full rollout. But the gap between a “bounded introduction” and production-grade integration across dozens of airline OCCs is where the real work will happen.
I’ll be watching closely for how airlines — particularly the larger U.S. carriers who were clearly in those operator consultations — describe their readiness when September gets closer. The technology story is already written. The workflow story is just getting started.