Jeff Wise writes:

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.” [Continue reading…]