Garry Tan

I asked Secretary Duffy what Americans should be able to do, if we get this decade right, that they can't do today. Sean Duffy is the Secretary of Transportation, and he sat down with me at our Startup Industrial Base event in DC today. He went straight to how our country's air traffic gets managed. At the command center, people sit in front of six screens with a paper flight chart above them, trying to make the calls on weather and routing. His example: four planes reach the same runway at the same time and only one can land. See it two hours out, speed up two, slow one down, and each one lands when the runway is open. "Like, not complicated stuff, but we don't do any of this." Paper and pencil and minimal human augmentation from software looks like this: Say an airport can take 15 planes in a 15 minute window. "Well, the airlines will schedule 32." He says he's handing the airlines that data and asking them to spread out. The tool is SMART, from Air Space Intelligence, a small company he says competed with the biggest companies and won. It predicts. His stage example: a 2.5 hour ground stop might only need 45 minutes. He's taken heat for supposedly handing air traffic control to AI. Duffy's answer? "it's dumb AI, not smart AI." Controllers still make every call. None of this needs a breakthrough. It needs the will of the people to know they need to use software and be ok with AI augmentation instead of insisting on a paper chart and copper wire.