FAA centralizes AI advice for air traffic

The Federal Aviation Administration is expanding SMART, an $875M cloud AI that fuses weather, flight plans, traffic flow and staffing to recommend routings and arrival orders to all 22 U.S. en route centers; a Washington‑based human specialist team vets recommendations and local controllers retain final authority. Early results cited: 180 reroutes, ~10 minutes and ~80 gallons saved per flight on average during the DC rollout. — National deployment of advisory AI in a safety‑critical domain raises urgent questions about human oversight, liability, vendor lock‑in, transparency, and tradeoffs between efficiency (fuel/time savings) and operational risk.