UN General Assembly Week, Trump's Triumphal Arch, Air Traffic Control AI

0:02World leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly this week. Wars in Ukraine and Iran hang over the meeting. President Trump and Iran's president will attend. So what does that mean for a world body that has not been relevant to their war? I'm Michelle Martin. That's Steve Inskeep. And this is Up First from NPR News. President Trump has a new rationale for one of his construction projects that faces legal problems. He wants to build a giant arch between Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. First, he said the nation's capital needs one. Now he says it will be a base for drones, snipers and ammunition.

0:34Does that make it easier to keep going without asking Congress? Also, the FAA plans to use AI to manage airspace. They say it will not replace human controllers, though it's deployed when the agency has thousands of controllers short. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.

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1:32And with fast, dependable delivery, Grainger helps her keep every facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. This message comes from Bombas. Bombas compression socks help keep legs fresh on travel days, work days, leg days, and more. That's all-day relief with everyday style. Go to bombas.com slash NPR. It's the time of year when world leaders gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. This meeting is the last for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. For me, this is not the moment to look back.

2:14It is a time to look ahead. Which makes sense, since the world body cannot look back on much relevance lately. World powers are fractured over climate change, AI, and wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf. NPR's Michelle Kellerman is in New York all week and joins us. Michelle, good morning. Good morning, Steve. What are you going to be watching for? Well, first will be President Trump's address to the world body. That's tomorrow morning. And while he's been trying to pitch himself to the world as a peacemaker, the war he launched against Iran really overshadows this gathering. President Trump promised it wouldn't take long, but here we are many months in and there's no sign the conflict is ending.

2:50And you know, Steve, it's really disrupted not just energy markets, but also the supply of fertilizers. And that has a big impact around the globe. So many countries are looking to the U.S., they're looking to Gulf countries, to Iran, to find some ways to restore those shipping routes. Iran's president will be here, so that's another big thing I'm watching. He'll be speaking a day after Trump. It's not clear if there'll be any kind of interaction between lower-level U.S. and Iranian officials, but U.S. officials haven't ruled that out. Okay, I don't know. They'll be in this giant building that is designed for diplomacy at a meeting that is supposed to be about diplomacy.

3:25Is there any chance of any diplomacy? Well, there could be on the sideline meetings, but, you know, the U.N. itself has really been sidelined. It offered to set up a system to monitor civilian shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, and that didn't gain much traction. I talked to one U.N. watcher, Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group, and he says, well, Secretary General Antonio Guterres really is trying to find solutions. The world is just too fractured. Take a listen. In some ways, he has been defending the idea of international cooperation almost after it's too late.

4:02Leaders like Vladimir Putin, perhaps President Trump, don't take this talk of global solidarity all that seriously. And there'll be some key players missing, including China's Xi Jinping, who's meeting with Trump later in the week in Washington. Gowan says it's going to be kind of a split-screen moment where you have the U.S. and China at the White House while smaller powers are speaking at an increasingly empty U.N. General Assembly Hall. And that just shows where power lies these days. So is the U.N. also irrelevant to Ukraine? Well, Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council with veto powers, so the council hasn't been able to do anything on Ukraine.

4:45But Ukraine's president will be back here this year. He says he's meeting with Trump. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to meet with Russia's foreign minister. And European officials are definitely trying to keep attention focused on this to help Ukraine get through another winter. What are diplomats of the United Nations also trying to focus attention on if they can? Well, climate change and AI are going to be big topics. So, you know, President Trump last year called climate change a hoax, and he tried to downplay all this latest concerns about AI, too. It'll also be interesting to see what Venezuela's interim leader, Delce Rodriguez, has to say.

5:20She was vice president to Nicolas Maduro before the U.S. military swept in to arrest him earlier this year. And while she's here at the United Nations, Maduro remains in custody just a few miles away. And PR's Michelle Kellerman will be listening to you all week. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

5:42The president altered the stated purpose of a planned triumphal arch in Washington. He first proposed it as a monument to America's 250th anniversary, but it's also a monument to his effort to reshape the Capitol. But in the face of legal difficulty, the president came up with a social media post. He says the arch will now be a military base for drones, snipers, and ammunition. NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordonez is covering this latest development. Franco, good morning. Good morning, Steve. Okay, so what is the context for the president's sudden change of plans for this arch? I mean, the context is court action.

6:16I mean, at the beginning of the month, the administration announced that construction would actually begin within two weeks. And then a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to give 48 hours notice before engaging in any activity on the site. So that slowed things down. So the new plan, as Trump laid out in a social media post, is to, quote, house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones plus snipers on both the roof and plaza areas. Okay, so this arch is a national security move now, according to the True Social Post, which sounds like claims that Trump made about his ballroom complex when it was blocked in court.

6:52Yeah, I mean, it's a very similar argument. The president claimed that the military actually called for this, for the Arch, but he's provided no details. I spoke with Mark Kansian. He's a retired Marine Corps colonel and military expert at the Center for Strategic International Studies. He's really questioning the reasoning for this, pointing out that Joint Base Meyer-Henderson Hall is just a mile away. The Pentagon is close by. And he says the national security considerations for the Arch and the White House are just not the same. The ballroom has a bunker, a large facility for the president underneath it.

7:26The difference is that the bunker reflects a widely accepted need to protect the president. It's bipartisan. There already was a bunker. This would be more elaborate. There doesn't seem to be any need. There certainly hasn't been any need articulated beforehand about why this facility would need drones and snipers. Franco, as you know, the construction of the arch is also part of a lawsuit brought by veterans. And one of their arguments is that it disrupts the sight line. You have this symbolic view in Washington from the Lincoln Memorial across the river to the former home of Confederate General Robert E.

8:07Lee. It speaks symbolically to the reunion of this country after the Civil War. But are the veterans the only ones concerned here? No, actually, a lot of people are concerned. And that's partially because it's so big. And it's just one of several projects that could change the Washington landscape. I mean, polls show most voters don't want this. I mean, we've already spoken about the ballroom, which is going to be a massive structure that changes the dynamics of the White House. Trump's also paved over the Rose Garden. He's installing a granite helipad on the South Lawn. And he's threatening to rip down the Kennedy Center.

8:43Well, how does all of that fit into his effort to expand executive power? Well, I mean, in this case, he's essentially ignoring many of the traditional processes in place, you know, skipping Congress and taking what is a very liberal interpretation of his own executive authority. And frankly, daring those opposed to him to try to stop him. And like the ballroom, many fear that he will move too quickly, much more quickly than the courts can respond to the point where it just gets very, very hard to kind of turn the clock back or stop or slow the project to make a difference. NPR White House correspondent Frank Ordonez, pleasure to hear from you, sir.

9:19Thank you, Steve.

9:28Some other news now. The federal agency in charge of air traffic control wants artificial intelligence to help manage the nation's airspace. Yes, the Federal Aviation Administration is preparing to launch its$875 million software overhaul as soon as today. Regulators and airlines hope the AI-enhanced tool will make flying more efficient. Critics question whether it will live up to the hype. We have a human being to cover this story. NPR's Joel Rose. Good morning. Hey, Steve. And it is really you, not a chatbot, right? As far as I know. Okay, good. Is a chatbot going to manage my next flight? Safe to say no.

10:03They're not going to put a chatbot in charge of your flight. Leaders at the FAA and the Department of Transportation have gotten a lot of questions about how this will work. They say it is not intended as a replacement for human controllers. It is just a tool. But it is supposed to make controllers' jobs easier by reducing congestion and conflicts in the air before they happen. Okay, so how would that work? So this tool is called Strategic Management of Airspace Routes and Trajectories, or SMART for short. Here is the FAA Administrator Brian Bedford talking about it at a Senate hearing earlier this year.

10:34The way we manage traffic today is chaotic and we can do better. We need to manage that at the FAA rather than rely on commercial airlines to simply schedule however they want. Bedford says this smart system will help optimize the airspace. Basically, it will look at all of the airline flights on the schedule as well as weather, wind, other variables, and tweak those flight plans to reduce the number of conflicts. The FAA is tapping a relatively small company called Airspace Intelligence to build it. This company has built some AI-enhanced dispatch software for Alaska Airlines and other carriers, but this is going to be a bigger and a much more high-profile test.

11:12What do the air traffic controllers think? You know, it's hard to say exactly because current controllers are not allowed to talk to the media. The union that represents controllers told me they were not involved in the development of this system, and they do not have anything to say about it. I did talk to a former air traffic controller named Dave Riley, who retired in 2020 after more than 20 years at the FAA. Let's listen to some of what he said. The fears of AI killing us all in the next 10 years, I don't think this platform is going to be about that. It won't replace humans. It'll be another tool in the toolbox.

11:44But of course, when you call it AI, it gets a lot of attention. Riley does not seem worried about this tool going rogue because human air traffic controllers will still be in charge of keeping the planes safely separated. But Riley is skeptical that this is going to be the game changer that FAA leaders say. He says it might improve operations, but it's not going to solve the bigger problems in the air traffic control system, particularly the staffing shortage. The FAA is still thousands of controllers short of full staffing, and that forces many to work mandatory overtime and really grueling schedules.

12:15So when does this new software roll out? We have heard it could come as soon as today. That is according to a government official and an airline industry executive who were not authorized to talk publicly about this plan. They said the rollout will start just in the Washington, D.C. area before gradually expanding to the rest of the country. The trade group that represents the big airlines seems thrilled to see the FAA finally moving to modernize the nation's airspace, which many people say is an important goal. And the trade group is bullish on what this technology can do. We are expecting more details about how this is going to look from the FAA as soon as today.

12:51NPR's Joel Rose, thanks so much. You're welcome. Now this week, the Sunday story features one of the biggest missing persons cases of our time. 14 years ago, the American journalist Austin Tice vanished in Syria. A series from NPR and the BBC searches for evidence of what happened to him. Here are a list with GPS coordinates of every location that Austin is possibly known to have been held at. On the Sunday Story, NPR and the BBC investigate the case of Austin Tice. Listen here on NPR's Up First podcast.

13:32And that's Up First for this Monday, September 21st. I'm Steve Hinskey. And I'm Michelle Martin. And today's episode of Up First was edited by Tara Neal, Dana Farrington, Jennifer Portman, Mohamed Elmar D.C. and H.J. Mai. It was produced by Ziaid Butch and Nia Dumas. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Nisha Hainas. Our technical director is Carly Strange. And we hope you'll join us again tomorrow.

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