‘Large-scale’ urban air mobility demonstrations planned in France for 2022 as part of new European consortium

A series of large-scale urban air mobil­i­ty demon­stra­tions using manned and unmanned air­craft will take place in Bor­deaux and Toulouse next year, as part of a new con­sor­tium made up of com­pa­nies from France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Co-ordi­nat­ed by Innov’ATM under the aegis of the SESAR Joint under­tak­ing, TindAIR (Tac­ti­cal INstru­men­tal Decon­flic­tion And In-flight Res­o­lu­tion) aims to demon­strate the accep­tance of this new ‘traf­fic’ in urban areas is pos­si­ble, while ensur­ing the safe­ty and respect­ing the pri­va­cy of peo­ple and prop­er­ty .

Addi­tion­al­ly, it also aims to show how this new and com­plex envi­ron­ment can be inte­grat­ed safe­ly with exist­ing manned avi­a­tion and air traf­fic con­trol.

From France, the com­pa­nies tak­ing part in this con­sor­tium include Aero­space Val­ley, ONERA (Office Nation­al d’Etudes et de Recherch­es Aérospa­tiales), Sky­birdsview, Rock­well Collins and APSYS, an Air­bus Com­pa­ny. Pil­do Con­sult­ing and TECNALIA is based in Spain, while CIRA, ISSNOVA are from Italy.

Join­ing from the UK is Sky­ports. As well as its efforts in the drone indus­try, the com­pa­ny also designs, devel­ops, builds and oper­ates car­go and pas­sen­ger ver­ti­ports. It is work­ing with eVTOL air­craft devel­op­er Volo­copter, which plans to launch its first com­mer­cial ser­vices as ear­ly as 2023.

From 2022, the TindAIR con­sor­tium will con­duct oper­a­tional sce­nar­ios which will address exist­ing urban needs or com­pelling use cas­es. This will include med­ical emer­gency trans­port to a mix of freight and pas­sen­ger flights, includ­ing extreme cas­es like sec­tor sat­u­ra­tion capac­i­ty and emer­gency land­ing. And all this will be done using air­craft of var­i­ous types and capac­i­ties with vary­ing lev­els of automa­tion, all shar­ing the same vol­ume of air­space.

The demon­stra­tions will also focus on strate­gic and tac­ti­cal assis­tance to con­flict detec­tion and res­o­lu­tion. The aim will be to val­i­date con­cepts of oper­a­tions and tar­get archi­tec­ture for con­flict detec­tion and res­o­lu­tion func­tion for all air­space users and will offer val­i­dat­ed and expe­ri­enced Uspace ser­vices to the future users of these modes of urban air mobil­i­ty.

This effort is also the oppor­tu­ni­ty to demon­strate oper­a­tions of a tac­ti­cal con­flict res­o­lu­tion ser­vice mod­ule that embeds an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence algo­rithm, which will can be inte­grat­ed into the future U‑space deploy­ments.

TindAIR is fund­ed by the Euro­pean Union’s Hori­zon 2020 research and inno­va­tion pro­gramme, under the: SESAR-VLD2-03–2020 “U‑space capa­bil­i­ties and ser­vices to enable Urban Air Mobil­i­ty” call for pro­pos­als.