AirMap wins $1 million contract from US Air Force to provide UTM services to Agility Prime programme

AirMap has been award­ed a $1 mil­lion Small Busi­ness Inno­va­tion Research (SBIR) con­tract to pro­vide unmanned air­craft sys­tem traf­fic man­age­ment ser­vices to the US Air Force’s Agili­ty Prime pro­gramme.

Award­ed by AFWERX, the US Air Force’s inno­va­tion hub, AirMap’s UTM plat­form will be used to sup­port the test­ing of eVTOL air­craft in prepa­ra­tion for the scal­ing of advanced air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions.

Lar­ry Berkin, GM of the AirMap Defense Group, which focus­es on pro­vid­ing mis­sion-crit­i­cal tech­nolo­gies to the US Depart­ment of Defense, said: “AirMap is proud to part­ner with the USAF to pro­vide indus­try-lead­ing UTM ser­vices for advanced air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions. We are excit­ed to sup­port all of the Agili­ty Prime par­tic­i­pants as they build, test, and bring their eVTOLs to mar­ket.”

The US Air Force launched Agili­ty Prime in May of this year to accel­er­ate the com­mer­cial mar­ket for advanced air mobil­i­ty vehi­cles. Its objec­tive is to rein­force the USAF’s com­mit­ment to part­ner­ing with indus­try investors and help­ing to fund the cre­ation of tech­nolo­gies which could be used for mil­i­tary mis­sions.

Agili­ty Prime has already award­ed con­tracts to eVTOL devel­op­ers Beta Tech­nolo­gies and Joby Avi­a­tion, with both pro­gress­ing to Phase III of the Ini­tial Capa­bil­i­ties Open­ing as part of Agili­ty Prime’s ‘Air Race to Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion’.

Accord­ing to the ICO, a suc­cess­ful Phase III can result in, ‘fur­ther pro­to­typ­ing, resource shar­ing, test­ing, pro­duc­tion, and field­ing as a launch cus­tomer.’

And last month, LIFT Air­craft suc­cess­ful­ly per­formed a flight test of its HEXA eVTOL ultra­light in front of senior lead­ers from the US Air Force. The four-minute flight took place at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas and includ­ed hov­ers, turns and for­ward flights – with the air­craft remain­ing 40ft (12 metres) off the ground.

Com­ment­ing on the con­tract win for Airmap, Colonel Nathan P. Diller, Direc­tor of AFWERX, added: “Thank you for your inter­est in the Agili­ty Prime top­ic areas of the AFWERX open solic­i­ta­tion and your work to advance unmanned traf­fic man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy for eVTOL air­space.”