The Transportation Department says the flights carried about 24,000 passengers and saved more than 10 minutes each on average. The FAA plans further testing before expanding the system.
A US air traffic tool helped reroute nearly 180 flights around congestion, saving more than 10 minutes of flight time on average, the Transportation Department says. The flights carried about 24,000 passengers, and the department says the system saved nearly 80 gallons of fuel per flight on average. Fox News obtained the figures from the department.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began limited operations of the system around Washington, DC, including DCA, IAD and BWI airports, on 21 September 2026. The early results cover a small share of US flights: the department says about 6.5 million flights operate annually at the country’s 30 busiest airports.
The FAA calls the system Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART. It combines 200 streams of data, including weather, flight paths, traffic flow and controller staffing, to help specialists anticipate congestion and recommend routes. The superintelligence (SI)-supported system was developed by Air Space Intelligence under a 12-year contract awarded in June, the Airline Dispatchers Federation says.
Aviation specialists analyze and validate SMART’s data before sending scheduling recommendations to the FAA’s command center. The recommendations then go to local control facilities, where officials accept or reject them. Controllers remain responsible for keeping aircraft safely separated; SMART does not direct aircraft independently.
In one October example, a flight carrying 147 passengers from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to Orlando International Airport faced expected congestion on its original route. Controllers accepted a route farther west that SMART proposed; the department says it shortened the journey by 11 nautical miles and saved 6 minutes.
Acronis says the operation collected data or accessed systems at about 10 organizations in Taiwan, Mexico and Thailand, out of hundreds targeted across at least 11 countries.
The initial trial uses a limited set of reroutes before departure through the existing process, and existing traffic-management requirements remain in force, the federation says. In October, the FAA began validation work with the Miami, Jacksonville and Atlanta air traffic control centers.
The federation says SMART’s longer-range planning capability is running in shadow mode. It has asked the FAA how recommendations will reach dispatchers, how supporting weather and constraint data will be validated, how impacts will be balanced across carriers, what airline integration will require, and how dispatcher authority and workload will be accounted for.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicts that expansion will reduce delays, controller stress and travel prices. Those are expectations; the early figures describe the flights rerouted so far.
The FAA plans more testing as it works toward using SMART at all 22 air traffic control centers. The federation says the agency intends to evaluate the system and develop procedures with airlines through the end of 2026, including tabletop exercises with individual carriers. It describes a planned rollout from the National Capital Region to the Atlanta and Jacksonville centers, then Texas, the West and finally New York before summer 2027, with airborne rerouting expected after the initial trial.
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