AI Is Taking Over the Skies—Ready or Not
Original: No Pilots. Few Air Traffic Controllers. What Could Go Wrong?
Why This Matters
AI adoption in aviation affects safety standards for millions of daily passengers.
From a 3,200-mile pilotless Cessna flight to the FAA's AI-powered SMART system, aviation is embracing AI fast. A nationwide groundstop on Friday the 13th raised fresh questions about whether the industry is moving too quickly.
On October 13, the FAA issued a national groundstop that halted flights across the US. The incident came less than three weeks after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy publicly hyped SMART, a new AI-infused air traffic control tool, calling it a 'GAME CHANGER' on X. The FAA found no evidence of a cyberattack, and officials said SMART wasn't linked to the communications failure behind the groundstop—but when asked if AI failure could be ruled out, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said only, 'There's nothing certain right now.'
Meanwhile, Joby Aviation completed a 3,200-mile pilotless Cessna Caravan flight from Concord, California to Dare County, North Carolina, navigating busy airspace and storm systems across four stops—entirely without human intervention on the controls. A safety pilot was aboard but never touched the controls.
These two events together capture where aviation is headed. AI is entering the industry at a speed the sector has never seen before. The economics are compelling: fewer pilots, reduced delays, lower costs. But critics are blunt about the risks. 'We're introducing all this new technology to improve the system, and it's going to be a disaster,' said one recently retired FAA employee. 'This is literally a Pandora's box that we are going to regret.' The roots of this shift trace to the early 2000s, when cheaper drones forced regulators to begin rethinking how airspace would be shared between humans and machines.