Air Space Intelligence (ASI), the company that built the Federal Aviation Administration's new artificial intelligence tool, pushed back Friday against suggestions that its technology triggered the nationwide ground stop that halted flights for roughly four hours.
In a statement posted to X at 5:34 p.m. EST, while the stoppage was still in effect, ASI said: "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."
The grounding, which began Friday afternoon, was ordered after a communication failure affected every Air Route Traffic Control Center, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. In a 4:16 p.m. post on X, he said the FAA issued the order "following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers."
The airspace was reopened around 8:15 p.m., and the stop was lifted, Duffy confirmed during a White House briefing that started 15 minutes later. He attributed the incident to an overload of data on routers.
"Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," Duffy said. "They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those … routers. And because of that, we shut the system down."
The SMART system — short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routing and Trajectories — was deployed in September in Washington, D.C., at a cost of $875 million. It is designed to process real-time data and weather forecasts to recommend flight path changes to air traffic controllers. Duffy had touted the tool as a key part of modernizing the nation's air travel infrastructure.
During Friday's briefing, Duffy was emphatic that SMART was not the culprit. "This is completely disconnected, and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I'll tell you that, but this is not even plugged in," he said. "So, there's no possible way SMART would have impacted."
The secretary used the incident to renew his push for a major funding boost, asking Congress for $50 billion to rebuild what he called an "incredibly old" air traffic control system. That request follows an earlier ask of $30 billion in September for new technology, control towers, and airport improvements. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin backed the call, saying, "It has to be a complete overhaul of the system."
The ground stop caused significant disruptions, including stranding college football teams traveling for weekend games. Lawmakers, including Representative Garcia, have demanded transparency, calling the incident "disturbing" and pressing for answers about the root cause.
Duffy and Mullin are expected to brief the press further on the communication failure and the administration's modernization plans, as outlined in their scheduled remarks following the incident. The FAA has since lifted the ground stop, but questions remain about the reliability of the aging infrastructure.
