Publications

Advanced Air Mobility encompasses emerging aviation technologies that transport people and cargo between local, regional, or urban locations that are currently underserved by aviation and other transportation modalities. The disruptive nature of these technologies has pushed industry, academia, and governments to devote significant investments to understand their impact on airspace risk, operational procedures, and passengers. A flexible framework was designed to assess the operational viability of these technologies and the sensitivity to a variety of assumptions. This framework is used to simulate air taxi traffic within New York City by replacing a portion of the city's taxi requests with trips taken with electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles and evaluate the sensitivity of passenger trip time to a variety of system wide assumptions. In particular, the paper focuses on the impact of the passenger capacity, landing site vehicle capacity, and fleet size. The operation density is then compared with the current air traffic to assess operation constraints that will challenge the network UAM operations.

Advanced Air Mobility encompasses emerging aviation technologies that transport people and cargo between local, regional, or urban locations that are currently underserved by aviation and other transportation modalities. The disruptive nature of these technologies has pushed industry, academia, and governments to devote significant investments to understand their impact on airspace risk, operational procedures, and passengers. A flexible framework was designed to assess the operational viability of these technologies and the sensitivity to a variety of assumptions. This framework is used to simulate an initial AAM implementation scenario in New York City. This scenario was created by replacing a portion of NYC taxi requests with electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. The framework was used to assess the sensitivity of this scenario to a variety of system assumption.

The success of many NextGen applications with time-based control elements, such as Required Time of Arrival (RTA) at a meter fix under 4D-Trajectory Based Operations (4D-TBO/Time of Arrival Control (TOAC) procedures or compliance to an Assigned Spacing Goal (ASG) between aircraft under Interval Management (IM) procedures, are subject to the quality of the atmospheric forecast utilized by participating aircraft. Erroneous information derived from provided forecast data, such as the magnitude of future headwinds relative to the headwinds actually experienced during flight, or forecast data that is insufficient to fully describe the forthcoming atmospheric conditions, can significantly degrade the performance of an attempted procedure. The work described in this report summarizes the major activities conducted in Fiscal Year 2015.