How we report, how we model

Who publishes this

AirTrafficTool covers the FAA’s adoption of AI in air traffic management and the public data around it. It is written and maintained by a small independent team, with no affiliation to the FAA, the Department of Transportation, Air Space Intelligence, any airline, or any union.

The site exists because the coverage of SMART has been heavy on announcements and light on mechanism. What does the system actually output? Who can say no to it? Which numbers are the FAA’s, and which are a reporter’s arithmetic? Those questions have answers in the public record, and they are worth assembling in one place.

Editorial standard

Every factual claim on this site falls into one of three tiers, and the page makes clear which one you are reading:

• Primary. Quoted or paraphrased from an FAA, DOT, GAO or congressional document, linked directly.
• Reported. Facts the agency has not published itself — contract value, for example — attributed to the outlet that reported them, with the outlet named in the sentence.
• Modelled. Figures this site computes, always labelled as a model and always with the inputs visible.

We do not accept payment for coverage, we do not publish sponsored content, and we do not present estimates as measurements. Where the record is thin, the page says so rather than filling the gap.

The calculator

The reroute savings calculator is deliberately simple arithmetic, run in your browser. It multiplies four inputs — rerouted flights per day, minutes saved per flight, gallons saved per flight, and the price of jet fuel — over 365 days.

Defaults. 10 minutes and 80 gallons come from the FAA’s reported average per rerouted flight between 21 September and 10 November 2026. The default 3 flights per day is that same report, annualised: 180 flights over roughly 54 days.

Exclusions. The model does not include crew cost, maintenance, airport charges, passenger time, connection risk, or any second-order effect such as fare changes. It does not model a specific route or airline, and it does not forecast what SMART will achieve in future.

Why fuel price is an input. The site has no business subscribing to a jet-fuel price index, and prices move. Rather than bake in a stale number, we show the price we used and let you replace it.

The airport status data

Airport status comes from the FAA’s public NAS status feed (nasstatus.faa.gov/api/airport-status-information), fetched server-side because the feed does not send CORS headers. We cache the feed for 60 seconds, and if the FAA is unreachable we may serve cached data for up to 15 minutes with a clear “cached” label. If there is no cached data, the tool reports an error. It never reports an outage as “no delays”.

We do not store your lookups. The server keeps short-lived operational logs (path, status code, timing) and a per-IP rate-limit counter in memory, which is discarded after the window passes.

Source list

Primary documents used across the site, with dates:

1. FAA: SMART begins limited operations · 21 Sep 2026
2. FAA: SMART one-pager · Sep 2026
3. FAA: Air Space Intelligence award · 22 Jun 2026
4. FAA: nationwide use, 22 centers, 180 flights · 10 Nov 2026
5. Nextgov: contract value and term · 22 Jun 2026
6. FLYING: SMART active at all 22 ARTCCs · 9 Nov 2026
7. Ars Technica: expansion and union response · 11 Nov 2026
8. Letter requesting a GAO review · 13 Oct 2026
9. The Hill: ASI statement on the ground stop · 13 Nov 2026
10. FAA National Airspace System status · live

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we want the fix to be visible. Email contact@airtraffictool.com with the page and the claim. Substantive corrections are reflected on the page and dated; the correction note stays up for at least 30 days.

If a claim cannot be sourced to a primary document or a named report, it comes out — even when it would make the story cleaner. That is why the deployment section says “nationwide airspace use” rather than “fully deployed”, and why the contract value is labelled as reported rather than official.

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