// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
No Pilots. Few Air Traffic Controllers. What Could Go Wrong?
On September 27, US transportation secretary Sean Duffy posted a video on X with the words “GAME CHANGER.” “Introducing ‘SMART’—the new air traffic management tool that saves YOU time, cuts back DELAYS, and makes your flying experience BETTER,” he wrote. This was a new AI-infused air traffic control system. Almost three weeks later, that post would get a new life, as a nervous joke, as the FAA issued a national groundstop on Friday the 13th that instantly threw the world’s airline schedules into chaos. The administration quickly announced that there was no evidence of a cyberattack, and no sign that SMART had anything to do with the communications failure at the heart of the government’s decision to suspend flights. But when asked on Friday night whether he could definitively rule out AI failure, Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin could only say, “There’s nothing certain right now.”
New systems like SMART are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the AI aviation revolution currently underway. Take, for instance, the Cessna Caravan that took off from Buchanan Field Airport in Concord, California, and flew south to Phoenix on a calm September morning. The plane, a single-engine turboprop, then turned east to Fort Worth, stopped at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, and finally arrived at Dare County Regional Airport off the coast of North Carolina. The zigzag, coast-to-coast trip covered 3,200 miles; along the way, the aircraft navigated busy airspace and maneuvered to avoid storms.
None of this would be remarkable, save for one fact: The entire journey took place without a single human hand touching the plane’s controls.
According to Joby Aviation, the company that carried out the project, a safety pilot was aboard the Cessna at all times—but never needed to intervene. The pilotless trip marked a major milestone in aviation. The air travel industry has long been technologically conservative, and with good reason: When human lives are at stake, it’s better to be time-tested and a little dated than cutting-edge and unpredictable. But AI is making inroads into aviation with unprecedented speed. The effects now are hard to see, but the changes in the offing are huge, promising to remake the economics of air travel and transform how people and things move around in the sky. A big question remains, though: Can we trust this technology to be reliable and safe?
Depends who you ask. “We're introducing all this new technology to improve the system, and it's going to be a disaster,” says a recently retired FAA employee. “This is literally a Pandora's box that we are going to regret.”
Aviation’s embrace of AI traces back to the early 2000s, when advances in batteries and microelectronics suddenly made drones much more capable and inexpensive. The surge convinced officials that robots and humans would eventually need to share the airways, and that new infrastructure would be necessary to allow that. At the time, virtually all aircraft were human-piloted, and there was no way for drones to avoid human-flown planes or each other.
In 2007, the federal government rolled out a sweeping project called Next Generation Air Transportation System—NextGen, for short—that mandated broad changes to the air travel system over the decades to come. Among its provisions was the requirement that, by 2020, aircraft in the United States be equipped with ADS-B, a system that constantly sends radio signals telling everyone in the vicinity where you are and where you’re headed.
Joby’s aircraft flying past Lower Manhattan, New York, in April.
With a road map to robot-friendly skies in place, big players like Amazon and Walmart began working on ambitious plans for drone delivery services. In 2014, Google unveiled Project Wing, a drone delivery offering that by 2018 was ferrying food, coffee, and medication to 164 homes near Canberra, Australia. The next year, the pilot program was expanded to Christiansburg, Virginia. Costs were high an