• 18 Mar 2025 10:00 AM
• 0

TVF 2025 Highlights AAM Progress and Challenges — Part 1: Introduction

By Kenneth I. Swartz

This series is an expanded version of the article printed in the March/April 2025 issue of Vertiflite. 

The Vertical Flight Society’s annual Transformative Vertical Flight (TVF) meeting has become an important annual touchstone for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft development and operations, bringing together engineers, technologists, thought leaders, operators, investors, researchers and regulators with an open format that invites collaboration.

TVF 2025 was held at Phoenix Convention Center on Feb. 4–6, 2025, including the 12th Electric VTOL symposium and the 11th Biennial Autonomous VTOL Technical Meeting. Since 2018, the Electric VTOL Symposium has been co-hosted by the VFS San Francisco Bay Area and Arizona Chapters in alternate years.

After a full day of invited plenary talks covering both autonomy and electric propulsion in vertical flight, the event split into two tracks for the subsequent two days.

The autonomy track included two dozen technical presentations focused primarily on the spectrum of autonomy in vertical flight. It also featured its traditional Titans of Autonomy invited presentations, featuring leaders from the nearby Arizona State University, the US Army and AAM airspace innovator SkyGrid, as well as an invited presentation from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).

Some 60 invited presentations over the three days covered a wide range of electric VTOL (eVTOL) and autonomy topics and provided participants with an in-depth understanding of eVTOL aircraft opportunities and challenges, propulsion system options, infrastructure and the future of autonomous systems for commercial and military use. Attendees also learned about the changing regulatory environment and investment climate.

Interestingly, the program featured three companies that have partnered with Robinson Helicopter to introduce automation, autonomy, simplified vehicle operation and hydrogen-electric propulsion into popular civil helicopter models, reflecting a blurring of lines between the helicopter and eVTOL domains.

Civic Greeting

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego rolled out the welcome mat for TVF attendees and declared that her city — the fifth largest in the US — is “open to innovation.”

She highlighted three projects in the Phoenix area to underscore her point.

The first was Phoenix’s standing as one of the largest autonomous vehicle zones in the world, with Waymo One providing autonomous ride-hail services across 315 square miles (815 km²) of the city. The second was the launch of Amazon Prime Air launch same-day MK30 drone delivery service last November. And the third was the $65B investment by Taiwanese chip maker TSMC — the world’s largest semiconductor company — to construct three greenfield semiconductor factories in Phoenix.

The City of Phoenix also owns and operates three airports (Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, Phoenix Deer Valley Airport and Phoenix Goodyear Airport) and Gallego aid it “is starting to map out infrastructure for vertiports and AAM.”

Call to Action

Dave Shilliday, vice president and general manager for uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and urban air mobility (UAM) at Phoenix-based Honeywell Aerospace Technologies kicked off the TVF plenary with a call to action for attendees to become leaders in the “global race to develop a low altitude economy.” 

He said this is not the time “to stick your head in the sand” and ignore recent developments, including dozens of eVTOL original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that recently exhibited at the Zhuhai Air Show in China to highlight that global competition in eVTOL development is already underway (see www.eVTOL.news/china).

Shilliday said that industry has to “stop talking about what we can’t do, but what we can do rapidly … to push forward … and get stuff into test” since “the more data we gather, the better the improvements.”

While some in the VTOL industry may reflexively dismiss eVTOL developments in China, Shilliday reminded the audience that China is home for the world’s second largest economy, a lot of data can be gained from demonstration flights, and Chinese eVTOLs will almost certainly be competing for future sales in regions like the Middle East, Southeast Asia and India.

For reasons of national security, Shilliday understands that the US will develop indigenous aircraft for defense use, but it would help if the Department of Defense (DoD) will continue to fund developments. 

At the same time, he recognized there may be a place for “all-star” eVTOL aircraft that integrate the best technology produced in any country.

Looking to use cases, Shilliday believes it’s time for eVTOL developers “to tell other stories,” because the stories about “well-off people flying over traffic is not a compelling mission.” Now is the time to highlight beneficial missions, such as aerial firefighting, crop spraying and first response, as well as the potential for AAM to develop regional economies. 

During TVF 2025, Honeywell announced that it intends to split into three publicly listed companies (see “Rotorcraft News,” pg. 6).

Boeing Vertical Lift

In his welcome address, Chris Speights, Chief Engineer of Boeing Vertical Lift said that the company has a long history of trying to incorporate autonomy into “all of its products.”

The AH-64 Apache and MH-6 Little Bird are produced at the Boeing factory in nearby Mesa, Arizona, and its employees form the backbone of the VFS Arizona Chapter.

Speights said Boeing’s journey to VTOL automation began in the 1990s with the Heliwing UAS, followed by the uncrewed MH-6 Little Bird outfitted with the Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System (AACUS) through Aurora Flight Sciences, and the Cargo Air Vehicle (CAV) eVTOL that was modified for Disney with body shells to resemble the popular X-wing spacecraft from Star Wars films.

Since 2015, Boeing has also developed the Chinook Active Parallel Actuator System (APAS), which can assist or cue the pilot and enable optionally piloted helicopter operations.

National Research on Civil VTOL

VFS Board member Derek Gowanlock is a Research Flight Test Engineer at the NRC, which is Canada’s largest federal research and development (R&D) organization.

The NRC’s Aerospace Research Centre has five labs supporting multiple focus areas. Since 2019, NRC’s Integrated Aerial Mobility (IAM) program has been supporting the ecosystem and growing Canada’s AAM industrial capabilities, developing new technologies and informing regulation development.

The program scope includes two innovation domains (vehicle and operations), four research focuses (integrated design, operating environments, flight autonomy and integrated aerial services) and 12 technological activities resulting in almost 100 on-going projects. For example, the NRC has spent four years studying urban airflows and their impact on uncrewed and eVTOL aircraft. And it has been studying the full-scale impact of drone impacts on airplanes and helicopters using a modified bird gun. 

In addition, the Canadian Vertical Lift Autonomy Demonstration (CVLAD) program has been demonstrating advanced autonomous flight technology on the NRC’s Bell 412 helicopter. The first autonomous 412 flight was conducted in February 2022 and a contested logistics CONOPS demonstrated in May 2023.

With shared sponsorship from the Canadian military, a much larger autonomous program was recently launched called AASCEND (Advanced Autonomous flight Systems for Challenging Environments development & Demonstration). This program has four lines of effort covering military and civilian applications of VTOL autonomy and even includes some joint projects with the US Department of Defense (DoD).

Dr. Michael Patterson from NASA Langley provided an overview of the research agency’s AAM research, including urban air mobility (UAM) regional air mobility (RAM) and low altitude uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) operations. NASA’s three primary areas of AAM research include airspace, aircraft and community integration. Many researchers have been assigned to AAM projects from across NASA’s matrix organization.

US Army Autonomy Research 

Lt. Col. Shawn C. Naigle, PhD, of the US Army Combat Capability Development Command (DEVCOM) Aviation & Missile Center (AvMC) provided TVF attendees with an overview of Army science and technology (S&T) research on tactical autonomous flight. Current autonomy priorities include launched effects combined with advanced teaming and platform autonomy.

The former includes on-demand UAS that extends the reach of crewed platforms to increase stand-off and survivability and collaborative autonomy. And the latter includes autonomous flight control and mission management enabling flight through unknown, dynamic battle space and landing at unsurveyed, unprepared landing zones.

Naigle said autonomy exists on a spectrum with higher levels requiring more sensors and software and can even be implemented as a pilot selectable function based on mission and trust level. A number of different programs and platforms (i.e. RASCAL, S-70, K-Max, S-70, Fire Scout and UH-60L) have contributed to current autonomous capabilities, with the next challenges including trust in autonomy, adaptation for Future Vertical Lift (FVL) rotorcraft, damage tolerance, GPS-denied operations, non-emitting sensors, perception and sensor fusion for degraded visual environment (DVE) operations.

GoAero

Gwen Lighter, the CEO and founder of GoAERO, has been a regular speaker at TVF since 2015, first as the CEO of the GoFly Prize and more recently as CEO of GoAero, a three-year global competition with more than $2M in prizes top build emergency response flyers that will rescue people and perform critical response missions, in partnership with Boeing, RTX and Honeywell. She gave an update on the program which in Phase 3 will include a final fly off competition event three (originally five) separate missions that test specific skills and capabilities in mock real-world scenarios. The original plan for five separate missions has been dropped.

On Feb. 11, GoAERO announced that a total of $100,000 is being provided to 11 Stage 1 winners to support the creation of their life-saving aircraft. In addition, $400,000 was awarded to 14 US-based university teams with support of NASA’s University Innovation project (see “GoAERO Awards $500,000 to Stage 1 Teams,” pg. 50).

To be continued ... in Part 2: AAM Perspectives