Overview
- Three companies — Palantir, Thales, and Air Space Intelligence — are competing to build SMART, and the FAA says a contract award is coming soon.
- SMART is designed to predict traffic flows and suggest small schedule shifts, such as nudging departure times, to prevent bottlenecks before they start.
- Officials stress the system will be advisory, with human air traffic controllers keeping final say over routes and timing.
- The software phase is pegged at roughly $12–12.5 billion, and the FAA has requested an additional $20 billion for future upgrades.
- NextGen, the last major overhaul, cost about $36 billion and delivered roughly 16% of promised benefits, which fuels caution about SMART’s reliability and payoff.