Highlight

In Urban Air Mobility – Especially in Urban Air Mobility – Time Is Money

Real-Time On-the-Fly Motion Planning Can Save Pilots Pax, and UAM Operators Time and Money

Your pax are onboard, you departed on-time. Your route was clear, weather was perfect and then – a geofence gets put up literally out of the clear blue sky. You want to minimize your snap trajectory and your trajectory but that’s easier said than done. Or it was, until a cohort of researchers from Cranfield…

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Eyes wide shut -- bad eVTOL pilot. Bad pilot.

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…

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colorful graphic of state of California with eVTOL

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.

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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…

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Two men in suits push aside different colors of a pie chart with an illustrated night cityscape behind them.

Future Forward: AAM By the Numbers

The size and value of the urban air mobility market is poised to soar in the next decade.

We’re talking billions. US$30.7bn — The value of the urban air mobility market by 2031 Source Allied Market Research 30.2% — Compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of urban air mobility market from 2022 to 2031. Source: Allied Market Research US$3.8bn — Value of urban air mobility market in 2023 Source: Markets and Markets US$28.5bn — Value of urban air…

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Maps and illustrations of Oklahoma City.

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.

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