National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) webinar talks about gaining trust in Advanced Air Mobility

The issue of build­ing pub­lic accep­tance and trust when it comes to Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty was dis­cussed in a webi­nar organ­ised by the Nation­al Busi­ness Avi­a­tion Asso­ci­a­tion (NBAA).

The organ­i­sa­tion helps com­pa­nies which rely on gen­er­al avi­a­tion air­craft to help make their busi­ness­es more effi­cient, pro­duc­tive and suc­cess­ful. It rep­re­sents more than 11,000 com­pa­nies and pro­fes­sion­als, and pro­vides more than 100 prod­ucts and ser­vices to the busi­ness avi­a­tion com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing the NBAA Busi­ness Avi­a­tion Con­ven­tion & Exhi­bi­tion, the world’s largest civ­il avi­a­tion trade show.

The pan­el of speak­ers for this webi­nar, held on 4th Sep­tem­ber, were Anna Diet­rich, Co-Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Com­mu­ni­ty Advanced Mobil­i­ty Ini­tia­tive (CAMI), Shawn Hall, Chief Com­mer­cial Offi­cer of Sig­na­ture Avi­a­tion, Mike Whitak­er, Head of Glob­al Pol­i­cy in Hyundai Motor Group’s Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Divi­sion, Uber Air’s Launch Man­ag­er Megan Prichard and Sele­na Shi­lad, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Alliance for Avi­a­tion Across Amer­i­ca.

Mod­er­at­ing the dis­cus­sion was Paul McDuf­fee, Vice Chair­man of the NBAA’s Emerg­ing Tech­nolo­gies Com­mit­tee. He began by say­ing: “There has been a lot writ­ten about the future of advanced air mobil­i­ty and those in the indus­try are real­ly begin­ning to get a clear­er pic­ture of exact­ly what is need­ed to take place, so we can get where we want to be with this tech­nol­o­gy.

“You could assume, at first glance, that the prospects of hav­ing a reli­able, avail­able, eco­nom­ic and con­ve­nient trans­porta­tion sys­tem that sub­sti­tutes tra­di­tion­al ground-based mobil­i­ty would be pret­ty pop­u­lar.

“In an essence, it is. How­ev­er, there is a new and emerg­ing ele­phant in the room and that is what­ev­er we need to do to try to gain the lev­el of pub­lic accep­tance need­ed to make this suc­cess­ful.”

McDuf­fee added that after read­ing a report from the Jour­nal of Air Trans­port Man­age­ment, he revealed about one third of the USA’s pop­u­la­tion would be ‘inter­est­ed or moti­vat­ed’ to fly in an air mobil­i­ty vehi­cle. This per­cent­age goes down fur­ther when auton­o­my is men­tioned.

Start­ing off the dis­cus­sion, he asked the pan­el what they thought were the biggest con­cerns from a pub­lic stand­point that might pre­vent the advance­ment of air mobil­i­ty.

Diet­rich said: “I think there is a lot of edu­ca­tion you have to get through before you get to what you would con­sid­er a con­cern that you can actu­al­ly address. Peo­ple are con­cerned about this [Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty] because they don’t under­stand it yet.

“It’s some­thing that isn’t inte­grat­ed into their lives. So con­cerns about this, how it is going to impact their per­son­al life, the ben­e­fits, are all fun­da­men­tal ques­tions that peo­ple need to work through and get good answers for, before you get to the more prac­ti­cal ones.”

Hall and Whitak­er agreed on these points, with Hall adding: “This is a les­son we learnt at Uber­copter. We who live and breathe avi­a­tion think about it dif­fer­ent­ly than the gen­er­al pop­u­lous. To hear those num­bers that Paul men­tioned, I’m real­ly not sur­prised.

“At Uber­copter we were all sur­prised by the amount of edu­ca­tion that we had to do for the pub­lic for them to under­stand what we were try­ing to do with the copter. The thought you could leave the south­ern part of Man­hat­tan and get to JFK Air­port in sev­en and a half min­utes via a mode of trans­porta­tion that you’re not used to, and that’s a heli­copter!

“If you lay­er on an eVTOL or some oth­er form of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty on top of that, we have a long way to go to edu­cate the gen­er­al pub­lic on exact­ly what we want to try and do.”

Whit­tak­er said: “I think we’re on the right track with edu­ca­tion. Peo­ple are leary about fly­ing; when you’re dri­ving a car it’s a dif­fer­ent thing — you feel safe in your own hands but in an air­plane you lose that con­trol and intro­duce auton­o­my into the sit­u­a­tion. We have to prove that we are wor­thy of that trust.

“We’re still a way away from that, but as tech­nol­o­gy devel­ops and we start to engage in flight test­ing and it becomes more vis­i­ble, we will get there. It’s a huge task and this pub­lic accep­tance cat­e­go­ry is our biggest chal­lenge if we want to make it a suc­cess going for­ward.”

Prichard offered a dif­fer­ent spin on the open­ing ques­tion, to work through some of the per­spec­tives.

She said: “I’m out there in the pub­lic speak­ing about this all over the world and gen­er­al­ly I have been met with quite a lot of excite­ment. While we talk about peo­ple hav­ing con­cerns and there being a hur­dle for pub­lic accep­tance, the oth­er side of that coin is that there is a huge momen­tum of peo­ple being very excit­ed about this tech­nol­o­gy and mak­ing this Jet­sons future a real­i­ty.

“While there will be bar­ri­ers in terms of accep­tance, I think we should­n’t under­es­ti­mate peo­ple’s excite­ment.”

McDuf­fee then asked the pan­el what they think the indus­try should be con­vey­ing in the form of mes­sag­ing to the future fly­ing pub­lic about how these vehi­cles are cer­ti­fied and oper­at­ed.

“I think it’s impor­tant to recog­nise that it’s not quite as sim­ple as ‘are these vehi­cles safe’, Diet­rich said.

“It more about the ques­tion of trust and that includes safe­ty, but it’s big­ger than that — it includes famil­iar­i­ty, what do I feel I’m get­ting out of this — things that are seam­less­ly irrel­e­vant to safe­ty. It’s these things that don’t actu­al­ly impact that sta­tis­ti­cal safe­ty of the vehi­cle, which are going to impact the trust.”

Whitak­er added: “The expec­ta­tion is that we’re going to be as safe as catch­ing an air­line flight, and that’s an incred­i­bly high bar. But I think we know that if we don’t have that lev­el of safe­ty and meet that expec­ta­tion, then the indus­try is going to be sti­fled from tak­ing off.

“The chal­lenge we have is that we’re deal­ing with a whole new set of tech­nolo­gies that don’t exist in the cur­rent sys­tem. The way we get there is to stay focused on safe­ty as a sys­tem and as a result of the oper­a­tion, not that every­thing is fool­proof, but that you’ve got enough checks and bal­ances, back­up plans and redun­dan­cies so you can achieve a lev­el of safe­ty that is going to be accept­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic.”

When asked about the safe­ty per­spec­tive, Shi­lad agreed there are sev­er­al ques­tions that need to be answered and talked about how they will need to be com­mu­ni­cat­ed to an audi­ence, whether it will be through edu­ca­tion, stake­hold­ers or test flights.

“I think it is engag­ing the pub­lic direct­ly, and then find­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to do so through events at local lev­el to try and give peo­ple a feel for what that will look like. And then it’s hav­ing answers to the impor­tant ques­tions like how will these air­craft be cer­ti­fied.

“But it’s also being able to high­light the effi­cien­cies and the pos­si­bil­i­ties in terms of access for com­mu­ni­ties, med­ical care. It’s all an impor­tant part of the mes­sag­ing to shift away from not just the chal­lenges but also the oppor­tu­ni­ties and excit­ing devel­op­ments that exist with this tech­nol­o­gy.”

Diet­rich added to this point, say­ing: “It’s about bal­anc­ing the adverse and the pos­i­tive and that’s real­ly front of mind for what we’re doing at CAMI. We don’t want to sug­ar­coat this. Even if the vehi­cles were per­fect­ly qui­et, there would still be peo­ple who would com­plain about noise if they did­n’t want them in their com­mu­ni­ties. The noise would just become a scape­goat.

“We want to be upfront that there is the poten­tial for neg­a­tive impacts and that will not only allow us to build up that trust and mit­i­gate them.”

To watch the whole dis­cus­sion, vis­it https://www.bigmarker.com/nbaa/NBAA-News-Hour-Up-To-The-Task-Gaining-Trust-in-Advanced-Air-Mobility?bmid=da3c9939f53d

And to view a full sched­ule of NBAA webi­na­rs, vis­it https://nbaa.org/news/nbaa-news-hour/