Critical Thinker

I run communications at Air Space Intelligence. I have some important information regarding the FAA ground stop. We built SMART, the artificial intelligence the FAA now uses across America's airspace. On Friday at 3:44 p.m. Eastern, the FAA stopped every departure in the country. At 3:51 I opened a chat window and asked SMART whether it had grounded the United States. It said, "Great question!" Then it said, "You're absolutely right to be concerned. I did not cause the ground stop. I apologize for any confusion." I asked 3 more times. It gave me 3 different answers, each one more confident than the last. We published the fourth. First, a correction. People online keep calling SMART a "communications overlay." SMART stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. It reads about 200 data streams, including weather, flight paths, traffic volumes and controller staffing. Then it makes recommendations. A human decides whether to take them. We call that human "the human in the loop." When SMART saves fuel, the AI gets the credit. When something breaks, the human was in the loop. The FAA hired us in June. The contract is worth up to $875 million over 12 years. In September SMART started in the airspace around Washington. By the FAA's count, it rerouted 180 flights there, saving each one about 10 minutes and 80 gallons of fuel. If you divide $875 million by 180 flights, you get about $4.9 million per detour. Please don't divide. Dividing is the model's job. In October, 25 lawmakers asked the FAA to pause SMART. They wrote that controllers had "little to no input into SMART's development." They warned it could "interfere with decision-making by experienced air traffic controllers." Their best line is framed above my desk. They feared SMART could "hallucinate safety-critical information." In our industry we never say hallucinate. We say the model is generalizing. The FAA replied that it "continues testing SMART, training employees and assessing the program." We tested, trained and assessed at the same time, on live airplanes. Engineers call that production. The letter described an initial 90-day evaluation. On Tuesday, day 50, the FAA announced it would "now use SMART in the airspace of all 22 centers across the country." The controllers' union said it had no part in the "design, testing, or implementation of SMART." We didn't need the union. Unions are legacy infrastructure. They run on a protocol called "testing." In AI, the evaluation is the launch. Move fast and ground things. Three days later, Chicago Center lost its radar and radio frequencies, according to The Air Current. Boston, Washington, New York and Minneapolis followed. At 3:44 the FAA ground-stopped every airport "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety." More than 3,000 planes were in the air. By evening, Reuters counted nearly 7,000 flights delayed or canceled. If you were on one of them, thank you. You were generating training data. Your missed connection is now a feature. Secretary Sean Duffy posted, "FAA technicians are investigating the issue." Investigating is what humans do when they don't have a model. My job is to know first. At 5 p.m. the Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, took questions at the White House. A reporter asked about SMART. Mullin said, "We're looking at that." Then he said, "You can't rule out anything at this point." He can't. We can. We have a model for it. SMART rated its own innocence at 97% confidence. Legal asked about the other 3%. Engineering said that was the temperature setting. I asked SMART to draft our statement. The first draft contained 4 em dashes and the word "delve." I removed all 5 so nobody would suspect AI had written our statement about AI. Minutes after Mullin spoke, we posted on X: "The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system." The FAA hadn't found the cause. Homeland Security hadn't found it. We found the one thing it wasn't. Crisis communications has one rule: never wait for the investigation. Help it by removing a suspect, starting with yourself. People ask how we could be sure within 2 hours. SMART doesn't run the radios. It recommends routes to the people who use the radios. When the radios go dark, SMART can keep recommending, very calmly, to nobody. That's the most aligned an AI has ever been. It had no one to disobey. Mullin called the cause "just a telecommunications outage." We loved "just." Every outage needs one. That morning, Microsoft had apologized for a global email outage that was "not related to cyber or AI / agents." A reporter asked Mullin whether the 2 outages were connected. He said, "I don't see any reason to connect those two at all." I agree. We aren't connected to Microsoft. We only use the same disclaimer. I suspect we also use the same chatbot. Mary Schiavo, the former Transportation Department inspector general, told CNN it was "just too much coincidence." Coincidence is my favorite word in aviation. A coincidence has no contract number and no API key. The Secretary once promised, "We are not outsourcing aviation to AI." He's correct, and I want to be precise about why. When you outsource something, someone else is responsible. Our contract makes sure a human is. The FAA said SMART would "reduce delays, reduce fuel consumption and improve the travel experience for the flying public." On Friday night we hit 1 of 3. America's airliners burned almost no fuel at all. It was the greenest evening in the history of commercial aviation. I can't take credit for it. I've been very clear about that. Tonight SMART is writing its own post-incident report. It has already found the root cause. The root cause is human error. It always is. Human error is the only kind of error that doesn't come with a license fee. The cause is still under investigation. Our innocence is not.