The Federal Aviation Administration has committed $875 million to a Seattle-area technology company tasked with transforming how the nation manages air traffic, marking one of the most ambitious modernization efforts in the agency's history.
Air Space Intelligence, a startup that developed software already in use by major carriers, will build what the FAA calls the SMART system — Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories. The initiative represents a fundamental shift toward using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to manage the world's busiest and most complex airspace.
The company's existing product, Flyways AI, offers a preview of how the technology might function nationwide. Alaska Airlines adopted the system in 2021, becoming the first carrier to integrate the software into its operations center located in an office building's sixth story near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The airline now operates approximately 1,500 flights daily, with dispatchers at a facility called The Hub relying on Flyways to process vast streams of data from multiple sources. The software analyzes air traffic patterns, meteorological conditions, and high-altitude wind currents to generate route recommendations that human operators might overlook.
"It ingests all that information," Alek Mead, a manager in Alaska's Network Operations Center, told NPR, "and it really kind of puts us all together in a nice little package for the dispatcher to look at, take some options, maybe play around with some different ideas, and then pick the most efficient and the safest route."
The results have been substantial. Alaska Airlines reports saving tens of thousands of flight hours and roughly a million gallons of fuel annually through the system's optimization capabilities.
Captain Bret Peyton, who oversees network operations control at Alaska, emphasized that the technology assists rather than replaces human judgment. "It doesn't decide the route or waypoints that a dispatcher uses to get an airplane from A to B, but it does help provide suggestions that might be more efficient," he told NPR. "That's where Flyways is really excelling for us."
The system operates by anticipating flight conditions before they occur, processing information to create what Phillip Buckendorf, who co-founded Air Space Intelligence and serves as its chief executive, described as a predictive picture rather than static displays.
"It's actually a really fundamental change, a massive behavior change," Buckendorf said during an appearance on the podcast Crossing the Valley last year. "One of the hardest things is we're dealing with users that have basically made decisions against static displays for like 10, 20 years of their career. And so now they basically make a decision against a predictive picture."
Air Space Intelligence has expanded beyond Alaska Airlines to serve Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and military branches including the U.S. Army and Air Force.
Bryan Bedford, who leads the Federal Aviation Administration, outlined his vision for the technology at an industry conference in May. "I think we've got a real opportunity to do something transformational with AI," he said, according to NPR.
Bedford acknowledged that while current safety protocols effectively separate aircraft throughout their journeys, the system lacks coordination. "What we're seeing is a system that is woefully unorganized," he told NPR. "We don't have in any of our facilities the ability to see the entire national airspace picture in a unified way."
The FAA administrator argued that predictive analytics could eliminate bottlenecks and congestion through minor modifications to schedules and flight paths, preventing problems before they develop.
The modernization effort aligns with the Trump administration's broader initiative to deliver what officials call a Brand New Air Traffic Control System. FAA representatives have stressed that the technology will augment air traffic controllers rather than eliminate their positions.
Questions remain about whether software that optimizes operations for individual airlines can successfully scale to manage the entire national airspace. However, Alaska Airlines reports that initial skepticism among its dispatchers dissipated quickly once they observed tangible results.
"It took a while for us to convince the dispatch group that it is what we say it is, which is a decision making aid, and not a tool that's going to run rogue and make weird decisions for the dispatcher," Peyton told NPR. "And it happened relatively quickly once dispatchers saw their true results that were pretty immediate."
