By Vincent E. Bianco III
ATC Correspondent, Leeham News & Analysis
June 7, 2026, © Leeham News: The current discourse over Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Air Traffic Control (ATC) is consuming political bandwidth on the easy case while the harder cases continue to be decided by default. Three structural questions are coming, whether the public engages with them or not, and the regulatory architecture for each is more consequential than the Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories (SMART) procurement decision.
The first question is surface conflict detection at airports. The Airport Surface Detection Equipment, Model X (ASDE-X) was deployed in direct response to the 1991 USAir 1493 collision at Los Angeles International Airport. A US Air Boeing 737 was cleared to land; a Skywest Airlines Metro III airliner had been cleared onto the runway to hold for takeoff. It was night, and the US Air pilots couldn’t see the Metro. It landed behind the commuter airliner, colliding with it, and the combined wreckage slammed into a small building near the runway. The positions were out of the control tower’s line of sight.
The system detects aircraft and ground vehicles via transponder returns, generates conflict alerts when the geometry of an encounter on the airport surface meets defined thresholds, and supports controllers’ situational awareness during ground operations. The system is AI-adjacent in its alert-generation logic but is fundamentally a deterministic pattern-detection deployment rather than an optimization-derived decision system.
A US Air Boeing 737 collided with a Skywest Airlines Metro commuter aircraft on the runway at Los Angeles International Airport. Both had been cleared onto the runway at the same time. Credit: YouTube Air Disaster.
Air Canada ground collision at LGA
The LaGuardia Airport collision in March 2026 between an Air Canada CRJ and an airport fire department truck documented a failure mode in ASDE-X deployment that the regulatory architecture has not addressed: the system cannot detect vehicles that are not equipped to be detected.
The involved emergency vehicles operating on the LaGuardia Airport surface that night were not equipped with transponders that the system could detect. With multiple unequipped vehicles in close proximity to one another, the system could not establish high-confidence tracks and generated no visual or aural alert.
The technology installed specifically to prevent the next LAX could not detect the truck that produced it. The regulatory architecture for closing the surface technology gap exists conceptually — mandate ASDE-X-compatible transponders on every vehicle authorized to operate in the movement area — but the deployment has not happened. The political bandwidth being spent on SMART is not being spent on this.
The second question concerns automated route-conformance monitoring for rotorcraft in dense terminal airspace. The National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) final report on the January 2025 Washington National Airport (DCA) mid-air collision between an American Airlines CRJ seconds from landing and a US Army helicopter flying above its assigned altitude identified more than 15,000 near-miss events between helicopters and commercial aircraft along the route system surrounding the airport between 2021 and 2024. There was at least one Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) resolution advisory triggered per month going back to 2011.
FAA failed to act on NTSB recommendation
The Helicopter Route 4 corridor over the eastern Potomac shoreline was charted at or below 200 feet, with only seventy-five feet of vertical separation from a commercial aircraft on final to Runway 33. The Board had previously recommended that ADS-B In be required for rotorcraft operating in Class B airspace; the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had not acted on the recommendation between its issuance and the DCA collision. The regulatory architecture for closing this gap exists conceptually—mandate ADS-B In equipage for rotorcraft, deploy automated route-conformance monitoring at facilities managing dense terminal airspace, and integrate the monitoring with the controller workstation—but deployment has not occurred. The political bandwidth being spent on SMART is not being spent on this either.
The third question is UTM and AAM coordination for the eVTOL middle layer. As noted in our April 30 analysis, Joby, Archer, BETA, and Wisk are about to operate commercially in airspace that has zero traffic management infrastructure today. The coordination layer for that airspace does not exist. The regulatory architecture for building it sits across multiple FAA offices — the Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies, the BVLOS rulemaking process under Part 108, Part 146’s Automated Data Service Provider framework, and the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, with operations starting this summer. The companies that will provide the coordination services have not yet been selected. The architectural questions about where that coordination layer sits in the four-phase framework, what authority it has, what its failure modes look like — these are the questions that will shape commercial aviation operations over the next decade. The political bandwidth being spent on SMART is not being spent on these questions.
Summary
All three of these questions involve AI deployment in Air Traffic Management. All three require the architectural discipline that ACAS X demonstrated. All three are being decided by default — either by deployment delays, regulatory inaction, or procurement decisions that fall below the threshold of public attention — while the political theater over SMART consumes the analytical and political oxygen that should be devoted to addressing them. The institutional pathology is not that SMART is being procured. The institutional pathology is that SMART is being procured as the entire substance of the AI-and-ATC conversation, which leaves the architectural-discipline questions for the harder cases unasked and unanswered.
Part 4, The Pattern That Compounds, will appear next Sunday.
Vincent Bianco.
Vincent E. Bianco III is a 37-year aviation safety professional and the principal of Marivin Consulting Services LLC. He spent 23 years inside the FAA Air Traffic Organization — including six years as an Operations Supervisor and Air Traffic Manager — followed by FAA Headquarters contractor tours in GPS Navigation (WAAS/LPV) and En Route procedures (RVSM), and most recently eight months as Senior Program Manager for the Leader Capability and Proficiency program at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He serves as ATC Correspondent for Leeham News and Analysis. linkedin.com/in/vebianco3
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