NASA after more vehicle partners to join its Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) National Campaign

NASA is on the look­out for more vehi­cle part­ners to join its Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) Nation­al Cam­paign, which will focus on flight demo oper­a­tions as part of the first ini­tia­tive (NC‑1) in 2022.

An announce­ment made on 24th June called for col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties between US and Inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ers, with the excep­tion of Chi­nese-owned firms, which are inter­est­ed in fly­ing as part of NC‑1.

In a doc­u­ment pub­lished online, the goal of the AAM Nation­al Cam­paign series is to ‘pro­mote pub­lic con­fi­dence and accel­er­ate the real­i­sa­tion of emerg­ing avi­a­tion mar­kets for pas­sen­ger and car­go trans­porta­tion in urban, sub­ur­ban, rur­al and region­al envi­ron­ments.’

Pre­vi­ous­ly known as the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Chal­lenge before being rebrand­ed back in March, the AAM Nation­al Cam­paign is open to VTOL and STOL air­craft which will have com­plet­ed enve­lope expan­sion pri­or to Q2 2022 and are pow­ered by either elec­tric and hybrid-elec­tric propul­sion sys­tems.

Require­ments include hav­ing a min­i­mum pay­load capac­i­ty of 190lbs (equiv­a­lent to one per­son) and being tar­get­ed for pas­sen­ger or car­go-car­ry­ing pur­pos­es. They can be pilot­ed on board, remote­ly or flown autonomous­ly.

The first NC‑1 will enable par­tic­i­pants to demon­strate inte­grat­ed oper­a­tions in rel­e­vant sce­nar­ios that include two-way net­work flight plan com­mu­ni­ca­tions, beyond visu­al line of sight (BYOS) oper­a­tions, real and sim­u­lat­ed vehi­cle and oper­a­tions con­tin­gen­cies, dynam­ic traf­fic avoid­ance and tra­jec­to­ry man­age­ment, and approach and land­ing in the pres­ence of real struc­tures and asso­ci­at­ed mechan­i­cal tur­bu­lence. 

All of the par­tic­i­pants in the NC series will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide feed­back on the cur­rent set of test sce­nar­ios and sug­gest new sce­nar­ios to help NASA and the FAA arrive at a com­mon set that can be used for all par­tic­i­pants in each sub­se­quent NC in the series.

Cal­i­for­nia-based eVTOL start-up Joby Avi­a­tion is one of 17 com­pa­nies which has already agreed part­ner­ships with NASA for the devel­op­men­tal test­ing of its AAM Nation­al Cam­paign. Oth­er vehi­cle providers include Bell, Boe­ing, NFT Tech­nolo­gies, Pro­den­ti­ty and Zeva.