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Flight Crowd releases UAM glossary, discusses project to inspire students to pursue career in urban air mobility

Flight Crowd has cre­at­ed a UAM glos­sary and released its first com­pi­la­tion of key terms and def­i­n­i­tions from the grow­ing eVTOL air­craft and urban air mobil­i­ty mar­kets.

The urban air mobil­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty aims to bring togeth­er enthu­si­asts and experts to help edu­cate and grow the wider pub­lic inter­est in this emerg­ing space. Released today (Mon­day), the glos­sary will be con­tin­u­ous­ly updat­ed and improved, with every­one hav­ing the chance to con­tribute to this resource — either as an indus­try expert or an enthu­si­ast will­ing to sug­gest new words to be added.

eVTOL Insights spoke to Flight Crowd Co-Founder Mariya Tara­banovs­ka and Mariya Ili­na, Com­mu­ni­ty Out­reach Coor­di­na­tor, about the glos­sary, as well as anoth­er of Flight Crowd’s excit­ing projects, ‘UAM — Explore’.

Q: The UAM Glos­sary will sure­ly be a great resource going for­ward. Are you able to tell us more about the back­ground behind the idea please?

Mariya Tara­banovs­ka: “Despite the UAM indus­try being a num­ber of years old with most of us very much famil­iar with the ter­mi­nol­o­gy we devel­oped, there are still occa­sions when pro­fes­sion­als get con­fused and some mes­sages get mis­com­mu­ni­cat­ed.

“What’s the dif­fer­ence between auton­o­my and automa­tion; UAV, UAS and drone; UTM and UTC or how do you define a ver­ti­port etc?  There are too many acronyms to keep track of and the future flight indus­try is con­stant­ly evolv­ing – we keep intro­duc­ing new words and give them new mean­ings like in the case of AAM, pro­posed by NASA when the stake­hold­ers felt that term UAM exclud­ed cer­tain oper­a­tional use cas­es.

“It’s dif­fi­cult for us as an indus­try to keep up, but how about the gen­er­al com­mu­ni­ty; where do they even start their learn­ing jour­ney? We don’t wish for some­body to get over­whelmed and give up on the idea to advance their knowl­edge of UAM, because the cur­rent resources they could find are over­whelm­ing both in their amount and their com­plex­i­ty. Hence, we see a need for the UAM Glos­sary to exist. A glos­sary that would be inter­est­ing and sim­ple to under­stand, and accessed by the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty, but to also have a few inter­est­ing pieces for it to be infor­ma­tive even to an expert.”

“What we want for this piece to be is some­thing that is use­ful for all par­ties, with par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the end user. More­over, we open the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tribute to our Glos­sary to every­one – the pub­lic will have a chance to sug­gest cer­tain terms they feel need clar­i­fy­ing while the indus­try experts are wel­come to improve the expla­na­tion as well as expand the range of terms we cov­er.

“Today, we released a first batch of 10 words, but we plan on reg­u­lar­ly updat­ing and expand­ing the Glos­sary.”

Q: Your STEM out­reach project ‘UAM – Explore’ is also a great ini­tia­tive to help intro­duce school­child­ren to Urban Air Mobil­i­ty at a young age. Can you tell us more about the idea behind it?

Mariya Ili­na: “ ‘UAM – Explore’ is about putting Urban Air Mobil­i­ty into a real­is­tic con­text for stu­dents, to help them under­stand that the future is com­ing pret­ty soon! This activ­i­ty will not intro­duce UAM as some futur­is­tic con­cept, but instead pro­vide an image where all future breeds of mobil­i­ty work togeth­er.

“We will show stu­dents how UAM will fit and trans­form our dai­ly lives. Along­side a set of posters, the activ­i­ty will also include a quiz for Key Stage 3 (11–14-year-old) stu­dents, which will allow them to explore the dif­fer­ent career paths that they can have in this new indus­try. We wish to inspire them, as they are going to be the ones who will join the indus­try at its ‘prime­time’.

“Flight Crowd is pas­sion­ate about improv­ing the pub­lic per­cep­tion of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty and it’s impor­tant to start with school­child­ren. We don’t want for them to have a neg­a­tive per­cep­tion of future flight tech­nol­o­gy due to the expo­sure to, for exam­ple, cin­e­mato­graph por­tray­ing drones as poten­tial­ly destruc­tive and dan­ger­ous air­craft. We want young peo­ple to see the pos­i­tives before they might be pol­lut­ed with the neg­a­tives from oth­er sources.

“The quiz, will show­case the pos­si­bil­i­ties of hav­ing a career in Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly hav­ing to be an engi­neer. We believe that you can come from dif­fer­ent sub­ject back­grounds with there still being a place in UAM for every­one. By close­ly work­ing with the indus­try we want to ensure we com­mu­ni­cate the most up-to-date and appro­pri­ate mes­sages about indus­try devel­op­ments, while still rep­re­sent­ing the pub­lic views and putting our audi­ence first.

“The results page of the quiz will show some key stake­hold­ers from dif­fer­ent areas of UAM ecosys­tems, talk about their roles and what inspired them to go into future of aer­i­al mobil­i­ty. We hope to share this work in the next cou­ple of months with our cam­paign cov­er­ing both the schools nation­wide and across the world too.”

Q: Why did you choose this par­tic­u­lar age group and are you plan­ning to reach out to oth­er groups?

Mariya Tara­banovs­ka: “We chose this age group because we felt this was sort of a mid­dle ground for our first out­reach project of this scale. Chil­dren of that age are not nec­es­sar­i­ly over­ly con­cerned or indeed cer­tain of their future career path. And yet they are more mature than, for exam­ple, pri­ma­ry school stu­dents, and already begin to choose the sub­jects they like and form ideas regard­ing what they see them­selves doing longer-term.” 

“By no means do we see our­selves stop­ping there, indeed ‘UAM – Explore’is a part of a big­ger series of out­reach activ­i­ties and events we plan on under­tak­ing. Flight Crowd will def­i­nite­ly reach out to dif­fer­ent age groups with time. And of course, those expe­ri­ences will be tai­lored to that spe­cif­ic audi­ence.”

Q: Do you have a planned time­line of what your work could look like for the rest of the year. Depend­ing on the eas­ing of restric­tions due to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, could you vis­it schools and col­leges in per­son?

Mariya Tara­banovs­ka: “We cer­tain­ly have a time­line in mind and as soon as we’re allowed to and it is safe to move about, we’ll be doing the in-per­son STEM out­reach. In the mean­time, we are close­ly mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion glob­al­ly and hence invent­ing a num­ber of activ­i­ties that could be done from the com­fort of your home. It does seem to us that until the end of this aca­d­e­m­ic year, we will large­ly be focus­ing on deliv­ery of activ­i­ties and events vir­tu­al­ly.”

“Flight Crowd is work­ing close­ly with a num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties as well. We very much hope to be able to present some of the amaz­ing work that is cur­rent­ly being devel­oped in per­son lat­er this year – but again, let’s not get too much ahead of our­selves! What­ev­er the cir­cum­stances, I am sure the world and cer­tain­ly our­selves – will find a way for­ward!

Q: Do you have a loca­tion in par­tic­u­lar of where you’d like to start your project first?

Mariya Tara­banovs­ka: “We’re not try­ing to lim­it our­selves to any par­tic­u­lar region of the coun­try, because we see Flight Crowd under­tak­ing dif­fer­ent projects and deliv­er­ing events and activ­i­ties all over the UK as well as glob­al­ly.

Along­side the projects we set our­selves, we are col­lab­o­rat­ing with our indus­try part­ners and real­ly tap­ping into their data­base and com­mu­ni­ties they’ve built cater­ing to their needs. We’ve already been con­tact­ed by many fan­tas­tic indi­vid­u­als and organ­i­sa­tions, soci­eties and uni­ver­si­ties which is real­ly excit­ing. There are loads of projects we’re work­ing on at the moment. Very excit­ed to share some devel­op­ments lat­er, so stay tuned!”

Q: We’ve spo­ken a lot about pub­lic accep­tance in the past. Do you think we’re start­ing to see more col­lab­o­ra­tion from with­in the indus­try and com­pa­nies work­ing togeth­er to address this?

Mariya Ili­na: “We see large cross-indus­try col­lab­o­ra­tion announce­ments com­ing out almost on a dai­ly basis in the last cou­ple of months. More and more pri­vate and pub­lic enti­ties are get­ting excit­ed and are ful­ly sup­port­ive of UAM devel­op­ments – it is great to see we are gen­er­al­ly being more open and coop­er­a­tive.

“When it comes to the pub­lic per­cep­tion and accep­tance piece, the amount of sup­port we received from the indus­try has been amaz­ing! We’ve had lots of mes­sages from the UAM stake­hold­ers sup­port­ing what we do, as well as the gen­er­al pub­lic say­ing they are excit­ed about this future of aer­i­al mobil­i­ty.

“The indus­try is pas­sion­ate about Urban Air Mobil­i­ty. They realise the impor­tance of pub­lic per­cep­tion and how hav­ing us on board would be ben­e­fi­cial for all par­ties. Flight Crowd is about bring­ing togeth­er every­one and every piece of this UAM puz­zle. This is not the jour­ney to be walked alone, and we are excit­ed to be shap­ing this future with our com­mu­ni­ty. ”

For more infor­ma­tion about the UAM Glos­sary, vis­it the Flight Crowd web­site. And to learn more about the ‘UAM – Explore’ STEM project, you can con­tact its team by email­ing outreach@flight-crowd.com

A teas­er poster by Flight Crowd for its UAM Explore project which fea­tures Ver­ti­cal Aero­spaces VA X4 air­craft
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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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