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Elroy Air joins NASA’s AAM National Campaign to help integrate autonomous cargo aircraft into US airspace

Elroy Air has become the lat­est com­pa­ny to join NASA’s Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) Nation­al Cam­paign and will help devel­op key guid­ance for urban air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions.

It is cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing the world’s first end-to-end auto­mat­ed VTOL aer­i­al car­go sys­tems and will team up with NASA to improve the safe inte­gra­tion of advanced autonomous car­go air­craft in US air­space.

Elroy Air joins eVTOL air­craft devel­op­ers Alaka’i Tech­nolo­gies and Wisk, which signed infor­ma­tion exchange agree­ments with NASA last year. These com­pa­nies join cur­rent indus­try part­ners to pre­pare for the first Nation­al Cam­paign series, called NC‑1, begin­ning in 2022.

Clint Cope, Co-Founder of Elroy Air, said: “This part­ner­ship enables Elroy Air to bring its exper­tise in devel­op­ing VTOL aer­i­al logis­tics plat­forms togeth­er with the groups at NASA dri­ving urban air mobil­i­ty and rur­al air mobil­i­ty to be realised in the Nation­al Air­space.

“The demon­stra­tions we are plan­ning and the frame­works we’ll devel­op and val­i­date togeth­er will show­case that logis­tics will be a smart and large ear­ly use case for this new and excit­ing chap­ter in VTOL aero­space.”

This part­ner­ship between Elroy Air and NASA will ini­tial­ly address crit­i­cal Nation­al Cam­paign safe­ty sce­nar­ios, with a focus on autonomous flight and con­tin­gency man­age­ment, includ­ing col­li­sion avoid­ance, flight path man­age­ment and two-way net­work flight plan com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

NASA and Elroy Air intend to demon­strate key inte­grat­ed oper­a­tional advanced air mobil­i­ty sce­nar­ios using Elroy Air’s Chap­ar­ral air­craft, and will col­lab­o­rate on flight safe­ty reviews and tech­ni­cal val­i­da­tion approach­es.

But before any vehi­cle could go through test flights with NASA, the project had to cre­ate a data base­line. A heli­copter is being used as a sur­ro­gate UAM vehi­cle to gath­er that data through the NC Inte­grat­ed Dry Run Test, which began in Decem­ber 2020 and is expect­ed to con­tin­ue into March 2021.

Once the dry run tests are com­plete, devel­op­men­tal test­ing — set for Spring 2021 — will use Joby Aviation’s eVTOL air­craft for activ­i­ties such as design­ing flight sce­nar­ios for the par­tic­i­pants to fly, exer­cis­ing range deploy­ment and data-col­lect­ing pro­to­cols to pre­pare for NC‑1 in 2022.

Starr Ginn, Lead for NASA’s Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) Nation­al Cam­paign (NC) series, added: “The Elroy Air team impressed us with their inno­v­a­tive approach to auto­mat­ed car­go sys­tems and tech­ni­cal depth in hybrid-elec­tric VTOL vehi­cle devel­op­ment.

“Their track record design­ing, devel­op­ing, and safe­ly test­ing the Chap­ar­ral and its sub­sys­tems made them a great team­ing part­ner. The work with Elroy Air will help accel­er­ate the real­i­sa­tion of excit­ing new Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty logis­tics mis­sions.”

NASA will also seek to inte­grate Elroy Air’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems into an air­space com­mu­ni­ca­tions frame­work for UAM plat­forms that builds upon lessons learned from the NASA UTM (Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tem (UAS) Traf­fic Man­age­ment) project.

With sup­port from the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA), NASA and Elroy Air will test and demon­strate AAM sce­nar­ios in sup­port of mid­dle-mile aer­i­al logis­tics. NASA will pro­vide Elroy Air with sim­u­la­tion sce­nar­ios and soft­ware inter­face details to val­i­date con­nec­tion and data for­mats.

Each new vehi­cle and oper­a­tional use case added for test­ing gives the AAM Nation­al Cam­paign the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tin­ue its mis­sion of engag­ing with diverse vehi­cle devel­op­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers in emerg­ing avi­a­tion mar­kets for per­son­al, pas­sen­ger and car­go trans­porta­tion in urban, sub­ur­ban, rur­al and region­al envi­ron­ments.

For more infor­ma­tion about Elroy Air, you can lis­ten to our pod­cast with the com­pa­ny’s Head of Strat­e­gy and Busi­ness Devel­op­ment, Kofi Asante.

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Jason Pritchard

Jason Pritchard is the Editor of eVTOL Insights. He holds a BA from Leicester's De Montfort University and has worked in Journalism and Public Relations for more than a decade. Outside of work, Jason enjoys playing and watching football and golf. He also has a keen interest in Ancient Egypt.

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