NASA | NBAA
NASA’s National Campaign (AAM Project)
The Advanced Air Mobility project’s National Campaign will promote public confidence and accelerate the realization of emerging aviation markets for passenger and cargo transportation in urban, suburban, rural, and regional environments.
NASA views the term “Advanced Air Mobility,” or AAM, to encompass developing and deploying aviation in transformative and innovative manners in order to provide aerial mobility in ways not typically seen today.
NASA’s vision for AAM is that it:
- Is safe, sustainable, accessible, and affordable aviation for transformational local and intraregional missions.
- Includes the transportation passengers and cargo as well as aerial work missions, such as infrastructure inspection or search and rescue operations.
- Includes local missions of about 50-mile radius in rural or urban areas, and intraregional missions of up to a few hundred miles that occur between urban areas, between rural areas, or between rural and urban areas.
To help make AAM a reality for the United States, NASA will begin hosting a series of activities called the AAM National Campaign in 2022.
The AAM National Campaign series is designed to:
- Promote public confidence in AAM safety.
- Give prospective vehicle manufacturers and operators, as well as prospective airspace service providers, insights into the evolving regulatory and operational environment.
- Facilitate community-wide learning while capturing the public’s imagination.
The AAM National Campaign will bring together aircraft manufacturers and airspace service providers to identify maturity levels for vehicle performance, safety assurance, airspace interoperability, etc., and to develop and demonstrate integrated solutions for civil use.
Working with industry partners, NASA will develop testing scenarios that:
- Address key safety and integration barriers across AAM vehicle and airspace systems.
- Emphasize critical operational challenges towards commercial viability and public confidence in AAM operations.
- Identify requirements for AAM system development.
The first set of AAM National Campaign tests, “NC-1,” will enable participants to demonstrate integrated operations in relevant scenarios that include:
- Two-way network flight plan communications.
- Beyond visual line of sight operations.
- Simulated vehicle and operations contingencies.
- Dynamic traffic avoidance and trajectory management.
- Approach and landing to landing areas in the presence of real structures (e.g., buildings in an urban environment) and associated mechanical turbulence.
NC-1 will be based on safety scenarios for initial commercial operations proposed by industry for low-density, low-complexity environments.
NC-1 will include key elements that are required for industry partners to progress beyond initial commercial operations to scaling their operations for more complex environments.
Important to the future success of the AAM National Campaign is the close collaboration and involvement of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). NASA has already been working closely with the FAA and intends to continue teaming with them throughout all stages of the AAM National Campaign. NASA plans to address information requirements and provide lessons learned to inform FAA policy decisions on AAM safety, certification, operations, and airspace integration.
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NBAA Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Roundtable
NBAA’s Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Roundtable serves as a forum for high-level policy planning with sector leaders, to chart a course for the integration of AAM technologies into the nation’s airspace and infrastructure.
The NBAA AAM Roundtable provides a voice for original equipment manufacturers developing electric vertical takeoff and landing transport (eVTOL) vehicles and other systems, with regard to airport access, airspace management, local community engagement and other critical priorities.
Members of the roundtable include: Archer, BETA Technologies, Eve Air Mobility, Hillwood Aviation, Joby Aviation, Lilium, Supernal and Wisk.