NASA focuses on air mobility developments

The project, which will take several years to complete, will facilitate the introduction of future passenger aircraft and other advanced air mobility solutions. ANRA Technologies can play a leading role in related projects. The company will carry out the related testing and development in the FlyOhio cooperation. This is a programme led by DriveOhio’s Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) group, involving public, private and academic institutions.

Among other things, they are investigating safety issues related to drones and other similar vehicles, as well as the possibility of overcoming other emerging problems by integrating modern solutions into transport systems. ANRA has already made significant progress in this area, having successfully completed the NASA AAM NC (X3) simulations last year. This involved testing the related scenarios in a simulated environment as an urban air mobility (UAM) provider. ANRA has also played a key role in the global development of unmanned traffic management (UTM) and other drone integration technologies. In the current NASA project, the company will be the primary provider of urban air transport services, enabling information exchange between aircraft operators and other stakeholders, as well as testing and systems integration of related automated services.

The research will be multi-factor: new vehicle configurations will allow for both all-electric and hybrid-electric propulsion structures. In order to stay on track, the potential for autonomous vehicle operation and reduction of pilot/operator workload will be investigated. They will also address operations that cannot be handled by current air traffic management systems. FlyOhio’s team is collaborating with NASA on the design, modelling and simulation of the AAM part of the transport system. Among other things, they will investigate the community impacts of passenger drones and other AAM vehicles, address issues of social acceptance (including noise pollution), community engagement and infrastructure design.