A Startup Takes on America’s Aging Skies

For decades, the system that keeps American planes from colliding with one another has run on technology that predates the smartphone. Now, the Federal Aviation Administration is wagering that artificial intelligence can do what generations of patchwork upgrades could not: untangle the busiest, most congested airspace on Earth.

The agency has awarded a 12-year, $875 million contract to Air Space Intelligence, known as ASI, a Boston-based company backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The deal, one of the largest technology contracts in the FAA’s history, tasks the young company with building the digital nervous system for a national airspace that handles tens of thousands of flights every single day.

Why Regulators Are Betting Big on AI

The push comes after a string of unsettling incidents in U.S. aviation, including high-profile air traffic control outages and a devastating January 2025 collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial airliner near Washington, D.C., that killed everyone aboard both aircraft. Those events exposed just how outdated the country’s air traffic infrastructure had become, and how much strain aging systems were placing on human controllers.

Transportation officials have framed the ASI contract as the centerpiece of a broader campaign to build what they’re calling a new air traffic control system from the ground up — not just replacing old radar screens and workstations, but rethinking how the entire network of flights, weather patterns, and airport capacity gets managed in real time.

Under the agreement, ASI will deliver two connected technologies. One, called Flow Management Data and Services, is meant to become the new technological backbone of the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center, the facility that oversees national flight flow. The other, a system known as SMART — short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories — uses predictive artificial intelligence to analyze airline schedules, weather patterns, airport capacity, and airspace conditions to flag potential bottlenecks and conflicts hours, or even days, before they occur.

Alaska Airlines Offers an Early Preview

While the national rollout is still years away, part of the reason regulators feel confident is that ASI’s technology isn’t entirely untested. Alaska Airlines has already been using the company’s tools to optimize its own operations, giving officials a real-world case study of how the system performs before it’s scaled up to manage the entire country’s skies.

According to people familiar with the airline’s experience, dispatchers were initially skeptical that an algorithm could outperform decades of institutional knowledge about how flights, weather, and airport gates interact. Over time, however, the tool reportedly built trust by flagging disruptions before they cascaded into wider delays — the exact function officials hope it can perform nationally once deployed.

FAA leadership has been careful to stress that the goal is to support air traffic controllers, not replace them. The agency describes SMART as a decision-support tool that gives controllers and dispatchers more advance warning, not an autonomous system that would take humans out of the loop.

Skepticism Remains Over Scaling and Safety

Not everyone is convinced the leap from a single airline’s operations to the entirety of U.S. airspace will be smooth. Critics point out that the American airspace is the busiest and most complex in the world, and that optimizing one airline’s dispatch decisions is a very different challenge than coordinating thousands of daily flights across dozens of airports, weather systems, and jurisdictions simultaneously.

There are also open questions about how the FAA plans to certify an AI-driven routing system for safety at national scale, and how existing air traffic workflows will be managed during what is expected to be a lengthy, multi-year transition. Twelve companies reportedly competed for the contract, and the FAA has offered limited detail on how it weighed ASI’s existing airline deployments against rival proposals.

What Happens Next

Officials have pointed to a deployment target later this fall as the first real test of whether the ambitious timeline can hold, with full national deployment expected by the end of 2028. If the technology performs as promised, supporters say it could meaningfully cut flight delays, reduce fuel burn and emissions, and ease the workload on an air traffic controller workforce that has long struggled with staffing shortages.

For now, the contract represents one of the clearest signs yet that Washington is willing to hand a critical piece of national infrastructure to a relatively young technology company — a bet that will be watched closely by airlines, passengers, and aviation safety experts alike as the rollout begins. Next Article