Aviation expert suggests US flight groundings caused by technical error, not terrorism

Aviation expert Mary Schiavo suggests that the Federal Aviation Administration’s grounding of all US flights was due to technical error and not a terrorism.

“The FAA had announced [earlier today] that it was about to deploy… their new AI tool called SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories) to assist in managing air traffic across the entire national airspace system,” she tells CNN.

“Many times in the past… we have seen… mismatch of systems… new computer systems often have difficulties” interacting with older systems, she says, suggesting that a similar mismatch is what just occured.

“One of the goals of the SMART system was to manage the en route traffic… [offering a] “tremendous amount of convenience,” she says.

“We have not heard that it’s threats or criminal terrorism” that caused the FAA directive.

“If I had to guess [the grounding was caused by] modern computer systems trying to interact with older systems,” she adds.