NASA’s National Campaign Dry Run Tests conclude, project now preparing for flight tests with Joby Aviation’s eVTOL aircraft

An Inte­grat­ed Dry Run test using a Bell OH-58C heli­copter for NASA’s Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) Nation­al Cam­paign has end­ed, with the project now prepar­ing for flight tests with Joby Aviation’s eVTOL air­craft.

The first round, or build one of the NC Inte­grat­ed Dry Run tests, was com­plet­ed in ear­ly Decem­ber and this sec­ond round last­ed from March 6th-20th at NASA’s Arm­strong Flight Research Cen­ter in Edwards, Cal­i­for­nia.

Dur­ing build two tests, the heli­copter, which was pro­vid­ed by Flight Research Inc. in Mojave, Cal­i­for­nia, act­ed as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive urban air mobil­i­ty (UAM) vehi­cle. Test pilots eval­u­at­ed sev­er­al viable UAM flight pro­files with the heli­copter, with the goal to under­stand how a future UAM vehi­cle will need to oper­ate in a con­gest­ed urban envi­ron­ment. 

The team is now prepar­ing to con­duct flight tests with Joby’s air taxi in the devel­op­men­tal test­ing phase of the Nation­al Cam­paign. This phase will include activ­i­ties to pre­pare for NC‑1 in 2022, such as design­ing flight sce­nar­ios for the NC‑1 par­tic­i­pants to fly, test­ing acoustics, and exer­cis­ing range deploy­ment and data col­lec­tion pro­to­cols across oper­a­tional safe­ty use cas­es.

Shiv­an­jli Shar­ma, deputy lead for the Nation­al Cam­paign, said: “By using a heli­copter as a sur­ro­gate air taxi vehi­cle, we were able to exer­cise our data col­lec­tion sys­tems, sce­nar­ios, and test tech­niques. This will inform gaps in pol­i­cy and stan­dards to enable cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and oper­a­tion of a wide range of UAM vehi­cles in the nation­al air­space.”

Data col­lec­tion focused on basic vehi­cle char­ac­ter­is­tics and spe­cif­ic study areas. Includ­ed were sim­u­lat­ed instru­ment flight rule approach­es to heli­ports and ver­ti­ports, ter­mi­nal area hov­er tasks, divert­ing in the case of flight changes, avoid­ing build­ings, and oth­er flight maneu­vers under var­i­ous wind con­di­tions.

Along­side the flight test­ing, data was col­lect­ed by the ATM‑X team from NASA’s Ames Research Cen­ter in California’s Sil­i­con Val­ley. This includes real-time auto­mat­ic depen­dent sur­veil­lance-broad­cast inputs to rep­re­sent a future third-par­ty air­space provider, a GPS sys­tem and oth­er flight instru­men­ta­tion that could be onboard a future vehi­cle.

This col­lec­tion of flight tests will pro­vide a base­line set of data need­ed to sup­port evo­lu­tions in vehi­cle, infra­struc­ture, and air­space require­ments that will enable the inte­gra­tion of UAM vehi­cles into the nation­al air­space sys­tem.

Scott Glaser, senior vice pres­i­dent of oper­a­tions for Flight Research Inc., said: “This round of flight tests gave the team an oppor­tu­ni­ty to assess var­i­ous tech­niques that are designed to opti­mise UAM oper­a­tions in urban ter­rain. This project is lead­ing the way to defin­ing require­ments to safe­ly and effi­cient­ly sup­port expect­ed high-den­si­ty traf­fic on a nation­al or glob­al scale.”

Next steps include analysing the data col­lect­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA). This part­ner­ship and ini­tial data will be used to build the next steps of the Nation­al Cam­paign.

Dave Web­ber, FAA research flight test engi­neer and vehi­cle char­ac­ter­is­tics prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor for this project, added: “The results of these tests are expect­ed to form a cor­ner­stone for sub­se­quent flight and sim­u­la­tor research that will pro­vide valu­able data to indus­try, FAA civ­il air­craft cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and NASA.”