NASA launches activities for Advanced Air Mobility and prepares ‘dry run’ flight test
NASA has begun flight test activities as part of its Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign, ahead of Joby Aviation’s prototype eVTOL aircraft being available for developmental tests next year.
The project started with connectivity and infrastructure flight tests with a NASA TG-14 glider aircraft, which was conducted at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center from September 30th to October 1st.
In addition to assessing automatic dependent surveillance broadcast connectivity to the cloud and data processing system, these flights acted as a familiarisation exercise for the test pilots who will fly the same routes during the helicopter test.
These flight-testing series, called the Integrated Dry Run Test, will begin in December and involve a Bell OH-58C Kiowa helicopter, which will be provided by Flight Research Inc, of Mojave, California. It will be used as a ‘surrogate UAM’ to develop a data baseline for future industry partnership flight testing.
The project describes the process as ‘anchor and evolve’ – the helicopter represents the anchor of current FAA standards required for helicopters to fly today. Testing with industry will then evolve from these standards to mimic what an eVTOL aircraft will need to safely fly.
During the flight testing, test pilots will be flying the helicopter in ways based on how the project thinks eVTOLs will fly in the future. This includes flying terminal operations with representative real-time eVTOL flight plans and trajectories while testing interactions with a third-party airspace service provider.
Dave Webber, FAA research flight test engineer and vehicle characteristics principal investigator for this project, said: “The industry and world will see we are not creating something new; we are evolving standards so urban air mobility can become a viable market.”

The data collected from the three series of flight tests at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California will be looking at overall challenges the urban environment will present for future vehicles.
Included in this analysis are vehicle characteristics, the interactions with a third-party airspace service provider, wind conditions, flight path angles, heliports, vertiports, current FAA tools, and navigation systems. This flight test series will continue into early 2021.
Starr Ginn, AAM National Campaign lead, said: “The dry run is NASA testing our flight test infrastructure which consists of range safety, instrumentation, airspace integration and data collection. As the NASA subsystems mature, they will be tested at different phases of the dry run series where the final test in March will test the full end-to-end system.”
The purpose of the National Campaign (NC) is to eventually test vehicles and UAM airspace providers from various companies. Another focus is determining how cities, airports and overall infrastructure can support this type of passenger transport and cargo delivery.
Over the next decade, the National Campaign will be researching, executing flight demonstrations, and establishing partnerships for urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles, or eVTOL vehicles, in order to safely enable eventual integration with existing air traffic.
NASA and the FAA intend to collaborate throughout all stages of the National Campaign, from planning and scenario validation to execution of flight demonstrations.
The data and lessons learned from the National Campaign will help inform FAA policies and procedures that industry will follow to fly these various sized vehicles and diverse missions on a daily basis.
Ginn added: “The National Campaign is trying to verify the gaps in the current FAA standards that scaling eVTOLs operations can’t yet meet. We are putting these vehicles through the FAA standards for operations that currently exist. That is our measuring stick.”
The Developmental Test with partner Joby Aviation will include activities to prepare for NC‑1 such as designing flight scenarios for the participants to fly, exercising range deployment and data collection protocols.
For NC‑1, industry partners will focus on demonstrating integrated operations through flight activities with vehicles and third-party airspace service providers at various locations in the national airspace system around the country.

The integrated operations will allow collection of data from both the vehicle and airspace service providers as the aircraft performs approaches and departures in a number of conditions.
In addition, these demonstrations will enable communities and local governments to further understand these operations through assessment of the noise footprint of these new vehicles.
This project includes members from three NASA aeronautics centers including Armstrong and Ames Research Center in California and Langley Research Center in Virginia with leadership by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.
NASA’s vision for Advanced Air Mobility is to help create safe, sustainable, accessible, and affordable aviation for a number of uses at the local and regional level.
To learn more about the National Campaign (formerly the Grand Challenge), and current industry participants, click here.