FAA releases Concept of Operations v1.0 for Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

The Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) has released its Con­cept of Oper­a­tions v1.0 for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty (UAM).

Shared on LinkedIn by NASA direc­tor Pari­mal Kopardekar, the doc­u­ment is split into sev­en sec­tions and has been devel­oped by the FAA’s NextGen Office.

It describes the envi­sioned oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment that sup­ports the expect­ed growth of flight oper­a­tions in and around urban areas, the com­bined thoughts of the indus­try, NASA, and the FAA of how oper­a­tions may be con­duct­ed in the future, and also defines the UAM oper­at­ing envi­ron­ment in the con­text of Air Traf­fic Man­age­ment (ATM) and Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tem (UAS) Traf­fic Man­age­ment (UTM).

Its goal is to ‘pro­vide a com­mon frame of ref­er­ence to sup­port the FAA, NASA, indus­try, and oth­er stake­hold­er dis­cus­sions and deci­sion-mak­ing with a shared under­stand­ing of the chal­lenges, tech­nolo­gies, their poten­tial, and exam­ples of areas of applic­a­bil­i­ty to the Nation­al Air­space Sys­tem (NAS)’.

The sev­en sec­tions are Over­ar­ch­ing Prin­ci­ples and Assump­tions; Evo­lu­tion of UAM; UAM Oper­a­tions; Notion­al Archi­tec­ture; UAM Use Cas­es and UAM Imple­men­ta­tion.

But the doc­u­ment adds that it only presents the ATM vision to sup­port ini­tial UAM oper­a­tions, and does not ‘pre­scribe spe­cif­ic solu­tions, detailed oper­a­tional pro­ce­dures, or imple­men­ta­tion meth­ods except as exam­ples to sup­port a fuller under­stand­ing of the ele­ments asso­ci­at­ed with UAM oper­a­tions’.

It says: “While the con­cept of urban-cen­tred air trans­porta­tion has exist­ed for decades in lim­it­ed avail­abil­i­ty in the form of con­ven­tion­al heli­copter trans­porta­tion, this has not been wide­ly acces­si­ble due to high oper­a­tional expense, ser­vice cost for the cus­tomer, and neg­a­tive pub­lic response to noise and pol­lu­tion. Recent tech­no­log­i­cal advances have allowed the con­cept to evolve.

“The intro­duc­tion of the UAM con­cept presents new approach­es to avi­a­tion which will allow a new class of oper­a­tions to pro­vide an alter­na­tive inter­modal trans­porta­tion method with­in urban areas
where sur­face con­ges­tion caus­es sig­nif­i­cant trav­el delays.

“Sev­er­al indus­try lead­ers and oth­er stake­hold­ers have already invest­ed heav­i­ly in this new con­cept and tech­nol­o­gy with the goal of
even­tu­al­ly being able to pro­vide the pub­lic with per­son­al trans­porta­tion or car­go ser­vices.”

The doc­u­ment adds that the evo­lu­tion of UAM oper­a­tions is char­ac­terised into six indi­ca­tors: Oper­a­tional Tem­po, UAM Struc­ture (Air­space and Pro­ce­dur­al), UAM Dri­ven Reg­u­la­to­ry Changes, UAM CBRs, Air­craft Automa­tion Lev­el and Loca­tion of PIC.

The rela­tion­ship of these indi­ca­tors is reflect­ed in the below graph, with the evo­lu­tion­ary stages described as Ini­tial UAM Oper­a­tions, ConOps v1.0 Oper­a­tions and Mature State Oper­a­tions.

To read the doc­u­ment in full, you can vis­it the Nasa Aero­nau­tic Research Insti­tute (NASI)) web­site or click here.