ASI, SMART and the FAA ground stop

The FAA halted departures nationwide on Nov. 13, 2026, three days after ASI’s SMART tool went national. Officials and the company say SMART was not involved. No independent review has tested that. This view records who has said what, and how firm each statement is.

SMART went national

3 days before

Nov. 10; ground stop Nov. 13

ASI’s position

Not involved

One post on X, Nov. 13

Cabinet secretaries

Split, then aligned

Mullin: can’t rule out · Duffy: no possible way

Independent finding

None yet

5 statements unconfirmed · 7 items established

Date	Who	Kind	Status	What the record shows	Sources
2026-11-13	Commentators and news outlets Press	Third party	Claimed	Cable commentators and several outlets raise the timing and ask whether the new AI tool played a part. Rests on timing alone. None of the coverage reviewed offers technical evidence of a link. Sourcing: secondary accounts of the commentary; the broadcasts themselves were not reviewed.	mediaite.com · ivn.us
2026-11-13	Markwayne Mullin Homeland Security Secretary	Official account	Disputed	Says investigators are looking at the cause, including any connection to the SMART expansion, and that nothing can be ruled out at this point. Said on the day of the outage. Secretary Duffy ruled SMART out the same evening. Sourcing: two secondary outlets report the remarks; no transcript or video was checked.	mediaite.com · latintimes.com
2026-11-13	ASI Contractor	Company response	Claimed	Posts on X that the ground stop is not based on or a result of SMART, any ASI product, or its integration with the FAA. The company’s own account. No logs, technical detail or later statement from ASI was found. Sourcing: the post is quoted identically by several outlets; the post itself was not opened.	mediaite.com · ivn.us · geekwire.com
2026-11-13	Sean Duffy Transportation Secretary	Official account	Claimed	Says there was no possible way SMART affected the outage because it is not connected to the core systems controllers use to track flights. No technical documentation of SMART’s network connections has been published to check this against. Sourcing: one outlet’s account of the news conference.	geekwire.com
2026-11-14	Bryan Bedford FAA Administrator	Official account	Claimed	Says the ground stop was the result of faulty equipment and that there is zero evidence of anything AI-related.	abc11.com · scrippsnews.com
2026-11-14	Congressional Democrats Members of Congress	Third party	Established	Demand answers about the outage. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, senior Democrat on the Senate aviation subcommittee, says it warrants a thorough investigation. Sourcing: a syndicated copy of a wire or newspaper report; confirm against the original.	occasionaldigest.com
2026-11-15	FAA Agency	Official account	Established	Says its legacy equipment became unstable when data flooded the telecommunications network. Officials trace the flood to two routers installed by L3Harris, which runs that network. Agency statement of mechanism. It concerns the network layer, not SMART. BMRL’s L3Harris dataset covers that side.	dallasnews.com · cnbc.com
2026-11-15	Open question	Open question	Open	No independent review has examined whether SMART or its data feeds had any part in the outage. The public record consists of officials’ and the company’s statements. A published investigative report, GAO’s answer to the October request, or SMART’s interface documentation would settle it.	ivn.us · nextgov.com

Notes under each entry give caveats and conflicts. A note beginning “Sourcing:” marks an item that rests on secondary reporting and was not read at the source. What has not been checked is in the search log. Compiled Nov. 15, 2026, two days after the event.