Featured
Angry Birds: eVTOLs Need a Standard to Certify Vulnerabilities from Bird Strikes
More than 90% of bird strikes occur at 3,000 feet above ground level — precisely where most eVTOLs will fly.
Urban Air Mobility Will Stretch Pilot Fatigue Management in New Ways
Short-haul, multiple takeoffs and landings per day, and revolutionary, new eVTOL technologies will test pilot’s resilience in radically new ways.
Imagine yourself a taxi driver in New York City, London, Berlin, or Tokyo; dozens, maybe hundreds of trips in an 8-, 10-, maybe even 12-hour day. You’re doing what you can, as the movie Cabaret song said, to “earn a mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound.” Now, flash-forward to 2027 or 2030 and…
Where California Leads, Will a UAM Nation — or the World — Follow?
Aircraft, Operating Environment, and Oh Yeah, Taxes
California’s nearly 40 million residents could set the gold standard for UAM.
How Much Noise Will a Single Rotor Make When a Single Rotor Makes Noise?
Use the NASA RVLT Conceptual Design Toolchain to Predict Best Practices
In their paper, “Best Practices for Predicting Acoustics of a Single Rotor Using the NASA RVLT Conceptual Design Toolchain” presented at the Vertical Flight Society’s 6th Decennial Aeromechanics Specialists’ Conference held in Santa Clara, California in February 2024, NASA aerospace engineers Lauren Weist, Natasha Schatzman, and Dorsa Shirazi detailed the results of their study intended…
Winds of Change – A Proposal to Reconstruct Wind Flows for Urban Air Mobility
The Wind Beneath – Above, In Front of, and Behind – Your Wings. (Or Perhaps Your Rotors).
Predicting wind flows for UAM is a challenge to the safe integration of uncrewed aircraft systems into the national airspace. One researcher proposes a solution using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Reynolds-average Navier Stokes (RANS) model with current real-world observation.
A Drone Militaries Can Use to Seek and Destroy or Seek and Return
To Loiter or Not to Loiter, That Is the Munitions Question of the Day
Costa Mesa, California-based Anduril Industries has literally and figuratively launched its boomerang drone bomb. Equipped with an autonomous, artificial intelligence (AI) “brain,” the Roadrunner UAV is capable of taking down a moving target midair and destroying itself on impact. Should the mission not achieve its objective, Roadrunner will turn itself around and land itself nose-up…