The FAA stopped all departures at US airports at 15:54 Eastern on Friday November 13, and the Department of Homeland Security is now looking at whether its own new AI system had a part in it. Aircraft already airborne were allowed to finish their flights rather than be forced down. By FlightAware’s count the stop cancelled 1,913 flights and delayed 10,494.

The tool under scrutiny is SMART, for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, a cloud planning platform built by Boston-based Air Space Intelligence under a $875 million, 12-year contract awarded in June. It fuses roughly 200 data streams (weather, trajectories, sector load, controller staffing) and proposes schedule and route changes. FAA specialists review the recommendations, local management decides, and controllers keep responsibility for separating aircraft. The FAA put early savings at 180 rerouted flights, 10 minutes and nearly 80 gallons of fuel each.

The timing is the problem. SMART went live around the Washington airports on September 21 and was extended to all 22 en route centers on November 10, three days before the stop. The Department of Transportation attributed the outage to a communications failure across those 22 centers, and DHS said CISA is investigating while seeing no sign of a malicious attack.

Air Space Intelligence denied involvement the same evening: “The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.” No official finding has tied the system to the outage.

Concerns predate the incident. On October 9, more than two dozen lawmakers asked the FAA to pause the rollout until it answered questions about safety evaluation, personnel training and oversight. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association objected that controllers were left out of SMART’s design and testing, and asked the GAO to assess its safety risk management.

The prior two nationwide ground stops were September 11, 2001 and a January 2023 notice-to-airmen system failure. Neither involved a system whose job is to recommend the schedule.

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Is AI behind the ground stop? SMART’s maker says no · FAA expands AI-assisted traffic management nationwide · Source channel