FAA Eyeing AI, Machine Learning To Optimize Airspace, Scheduling

The FAA’s busy modernization agenda includes an effort to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to better manage airspace flow and reduce scheduling problems at busy airports, agency Administrator Bryan Bedford told an audience at a Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening. The event celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Air Commerce Act of 1926 becoming law and laying the foundation for civil aviation regulation and ultimately the establishment of the FAA.

Bedford delved into the future of the agency, outlining three prongs: air traffic control equipment modernization, staffing issues, and airspace redesign. 

While the FAA is progressing on both an equipment refresh and an aircraft control hiring surge, all of this will rely on the final pillar, he said, and that’s how to redesign the airspace. “How do we get from an unpredictable, chaotic, disorganized airflow management system into a strategic, predictable, precise air traffic management system, and do so in a way that reduces the controller workload, allowing them to manage more traffic, not less, with the resources that we have?” Bedford asked.

He said machine learning and AI-enabled technology have to be a part of that but “not to replace people.” 

Bedford pointed to the existing computing power and predictive power to give air traffic controllers 18 minutes of visibility into the future. While 18 minutes sounds substantial, given the speed at which aircraft travel, it is not that much, Bedford explained. “But we can use AI to solve the math problem, which is to not tell us where the airplane was based on the radar blip. Tell us where it is based on its speed and time and direction and altitude and winds aloft, et cetera.”

Using unlimited compute power in the cloud, the FAA would be able to tap into terabytes of data to examine 55,000 flight trajectories in the National Airspace System (NAS), deconflict them, optimize them, sequence them at top of descent, and optimize the capacity, he maintained.

“Now, that all sounds great,” Bedford continued. “Until you get to the final piece of the puzzle, which is that we have to change behavior.” This includes the behavior of commercial operators.

“We have to acknowledge that we can’t have seven airlines all trying to land an airplane at LaGuardia [Airport] at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. There’s only one runway,” he emphasized. “What the industry does is schedule in a chaotic way and then asks the FAA to sort it out.”

The FAA has built a digital twin of the NAS that can show the routes on any day. “It’s like a time machine. I can go back and look at any day over the last 20 years and tell you how it flew. I can tell you where the conflicts were,” Bedford said.

Looking at this data provides visibility into the future and shows where bottlenecks are stacking up. “It could look so much better if we strategically organized the flow of traffic before they actually sold you the ticket,” he said, adding that the FAA is engaging with the airlines on this.

The initial reaction was concern that the FAA wanted to schedule the airline. But agency officials responded, “No, that's not what we’re asking, but what we are asking is we need to have the discipline that we can’t all want to land at the same airport at the exact same time. It’s impossible.”

The FAA is already doing this the “hard way” through delay reduction programs, he further said, pointing to Chicago O’Hare International Airport as an example. “We’re doing it as sort of a blunt force maneuver.” But he said that, looking at schedules, he would rather have the agency find the pain points three months in advance to enable time shifts to ease that congestion.

“That would be a much more rational way to manage the business. It will require us to change behaviors, but we will end up with more capacity,” he contended, adding that this would enable airlines to shrink the time padded into flight schedules to accommodate delays.

Bedford further explained a shift within the FAA to move from a tactical approach to managing the airspace to a strategic one. “The Air Traffic Organization wants to accommodate all users. We don’t want to be the constraint. We are, in many cases. In many cases, we’re not. It’s the airport environment, the taxiways, the gates, et cetera,” Bedford said.

Controller staffing tactically deconflicts traffic, perhaps moving it among sectors and potentially setting up further need for rerouting. “As they tactically deconflict two airplanes using that 18-minute conflict probe, they have no idea if the trajectory that they’ve moved the airplane onto will conflict with the adjoining sectors’ traffic,” he explained. “We play this game of trying to balance the traffic, no more than 19 airplanes in a sector at a time.”

But looking at digital twins, the FAA can see where flight trajectories could collide and “fix all of that stuff before the planes even leave the ground. That’s using four-dimensional trajectories and machine learning with unlimited compute power to actually manage all these trajectories.”

As for ATC equipment modernization, he noted, “We had gone through this exercise a couple of times. We lived it in 2017 when the president announced he wanted to build a brand-new air traffic control system, and it just didn’t go anywhere.”

He explained that this is because the industry was focused on privatization. “We all thought privatization was going to be the key to building a better aviation, sustainable aviation air navigation system, and so we spent the next four years of the president’s administration arguing over who would pay for it,” he said. “We argued away a three-and-a-half-year opportunity. We squandered an opportunity to do something that could have ultimately avoided what became January 29 [the 2025 midair collision by Ronald Reagan National Airport, KDCA]. We blew it.”

But he reiterated the sentiment that the aviation community is in a “rare moment of time when everybody’s interests align, and we’re no longer lying to ourselves, telling ourselves we have the gold standard of world aviation.” Bedford added that he didn’t know who did, “because I talked to everybody around the globe, and everybody has the same problems that we do.” Having said that, he stressed that the U.S. system remains safe.

The White House, however, put the FAA on notice to move on modernization and to get it done by 2028. “That’s aspirational,” Bedford conceded. “But how do you do any big project? You break it into small pieces.”

This includes replacing the miles of copper wire with high-speed fiber or 5G connectivity. It also includes replacing the analog switches that are so aged they are no longer on the market, as well as radars dating to the 1970s and 1980s.

To form a plan, Bedford said he spent his first 90 days in the field examining facilities and hearing concerns of the people on the front line. “I have to admit those were 90 dark days, but that’s okay. It got ‘better’ because we went right into shutdown, and we spent the next 43 days not paying our employees to try to do the work that we desperately need them doing,” he said with irony to highlight the difficulties. “So yeah, my first five months on the job were a little painful. But we figured out how to prioritize the work and sequence the work.”

This includes working through bottlenecks to procurement, and Bedford maintained, “Now I can say with a high level of confidence we will complete the re-equipage portion of our modernization efforts by the third quarter of 2028. I have a keen line of sight on the outcomes.”

But the community can’t stop there, Bedford stressed. “We will get that done. We can high-five and say, ‘Okay, we have a highly reliable, woefully inadequate air traffic control system.’” The administration received a $12.5 billion “down payment” on modernization but has asked for a total of $31 billion to move from the existing system toward a common automation platform that is future-forward and can streamline the airspace.

He conceded that the current modernization project has some resistance from those preferring analog over digital and who argue that analog is hard to hack. “I don’t think that’s a reason we don’t want to modernize,” he said.

But equipment modernization is only one-third of the proposition, he continued, with staffing being another prong. “The FAA doesn’t have enough trained controllers to do the job, and that’s the job today. What about drones? What about advanced air mobility? What about supersonic? What about a daily cadence of space launches? There are a lot of demands on the airspace.”

This places an imperative of hiring more controllers, he said, and pointed to the ongoing hiring surge. He pointed to the 2,000 candidates hired in 2025, with the pace accelerating to 2,200 this year, and 2,300 next year.

He called criticism around the FAA’s move to reduce its full staffing targets by 2,000 certified air traffic controllers “a complete red herring. That’s a distraction. We will solve the staffing issues before the end of 2028.”

He also detailed his journey to the FAA administrator’s role after serving as CEO of Republic Airways, recalling that he was first approached by the administration for a potential job in the transportation cabinet even before the election. At the time, he had no interest in the administrator’s job—“hard pass,” Bedford said. But that changed after the Jan. 29, 2025 midair collision at KDCA, where Republic had 130 daily flights.

“The world changed for all of us, and we don’t compete on safety,” he said. “We want to share safety information, we want to lean into safety, and when we see a tragedy….that’s a moment where the entire industry grieves. It was a loss for all of us, and we were all wondering what we could have done to make things better.”