• 29 Jun 2021 01:09 PM
• 0

NASA Completes Initial Efforts

An Integrated Dry Run test using a helicopter for NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) National Campaign was competed in March. The first round of tests was completed in early December and this second round was held March 6–20 at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, both using a Bell OH-58C Kiowa helicopter as a representative AAM vehicle. In March, test pilots evaluated several viable UAM flight profiles with the helicopter. The goal was to understand how a future UAM vehicle will need to operate in a congested urban environment. The next phase of the effort will be preparing for flight tests with Joby Aviation’s air taxi.

Meanwhile, in May, NASA officially completed its Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) project. UTM was a research project exploring all the elements needed to manage flights of drones, with a series of four annual technical capability level (TCL) demonstrations, beginning in August 2015. The result was an automated, decentralized system capable of coordinating an ever-growing number of flights. NASA worked with partners from commercial industry and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to invent a whole new type of air traffic management where multiple parties work together to provide services. UTM’s research results were transferred in stages to the FAA, which continues testing and is implementing the system with industry partners.