Varon Vehicles’ fifth think tank on Urban Air Mobility in Latin America continues to cover key industry topics

Anoth­er great pan­el of speak­ers came togeth­er for Varon Vehi­cles’ lat­est think tank about the imple­men­ta­tion of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in Latin Amer­i­ca, which this time focused on Latin Amer­i­can cities.

Since the first ses­sion was held at the start of August, each one-hour ses­sion aims to bring stake­hold­ers from across the indus­try into con­ver­sa­tions on a range of top­ics, includ­ing ver­ti­ports, air­space inte­gra­tion, reg­u­la­tions and pub­lic adop­tion.

Join­ing the dis­cus­sion for this think tank was James Sher­man, Direc­tor of Strate­gic Devel­op­ment at the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety, Luis Alon­so, Research Sci­en­tist in the City Sci­ence group at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (MIT), David Rus­sell, Co-Founder and CTO of Airio, Jared Essel­man, Prin­ci­pal of Aer­i­al Trans­porta­tion Solu­tions, and Simon Briceno, Head of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty at Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty.

Dur­ing the hour, the pan­el talked about Urban Geo­des­ics, Users Fear Bar­ri­er / Safe­ty Per­cep­tion, Impacts on Gen­er­al Mobil­i­ty, Air Vehi­cles Den­si­ty Expec­ta­tion and Elec­tric Grid Sourc­ing Avail­abil­i­ty.

Mod­er­at­ing the ses­sion, Felipe Varon, Founder and CEO of Varon Vehi­cles, said: “We want to talk about the over­all rea­son why we are imple­ment­ing Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in the first place. What are we try­ing achieve? We have to take in an urban per­spec­tive, a city point of view, to answer that ques­tion. What types of prob­lems are we try­ing to tack­le and what are the impacts we expect to see, be them both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive in our cities.”

Varon also start­ed off the con­ver­sa­tion by intro­duc­ing Urban Geo­des­ics, which is defined as the short­est path between two ver­ti­ports in the urban or mobil­i­ty sce­nario.

“When we design these air­space vol­umes between ver­ti­ports, we have to take into account no-fly zones, weath­er con­di­tions, topog­ra­phy and oth­er known vari­ables low-alti­tude aero­space over a city to design these lanes. The urban geo­des­ic is a tool that helps us organ­ise traf­fic as we design urban air mobil­i­ty for the city.”

Talk­ing first about urban geo­des­ics was Rus­sell, who said: “This is a fair­ly well under­stood prob­lem that can be han­dled in two dif­fer­ent ways. When we’re deal­ing with one vehi­cle and its par­tic­u­lar flight path, we gen­er­al­ly build a three-dimen­sion­al mod­els of the area where it is going to pass, and then we define that par­tic­u­lar vari­able.

“In this case, we’re defin­ing a more per­ma­nent struc­ture so we can take more time to do that. There can be opti­mi­sa­tion routes which can be brought to bear and there are auto-rout­ing types of rou­tines, but they are all based on cost func­tion. That’s where you define the vari­ables that are going to impact whether it’s good or bad.

“In terms of good, you want to min­imise dis­tance, but that might come at the cost of how many times I have to change direc­tions or alti­tudes. Do I want to avoid fly­ing over schools, or enhance fly­ing over rail­roads, cars or oth­er items.

“By cre­at­ing the entire list of vari­ables, we can mea­sure in a 10 metre grid through­out the area we can then do either an opti­mi­sa­tion sweep use a sim­ple met­ric search — which asks if you want the best solu­tion, or get­ting one of maybe a hun­dred good solu­tions. It’s fair­ly easy to solve this prob­lem, espe­cial­ly since you’re only look­ing for one real track with a lot of def­i­n­i­tions.”

Briceno expand­ed on Rus­sel­l’s points about the urban geo­des­ic, adding that he men­tioned all the key inputs to design­ing these routes.

“It’s def­i­nite­ly very crit­i­cal from an oper­a­tor’s or air­craft stand­point. Some of those points will include the flight pro­file that is spe­cif­ic in some ways to the air­craft from a per­for­mance stand­point, the approach and depar­ture pro­ce­dures. As you fly low­er to the ground, there’s going to be a real­ly impor­tant need to under­stand all the topog­ra­phy and obsta­cles.

“It’s not just about hav­ing a good under­stand­ing of what to avoid on the ground, but to ensure that over time we know that the mod­el is updat­ed and we now that quite well with heli­copter oper­a­tions and pow­er­lines, that it’s a big con­cern with them fly­ing low to the ground. As we design these geo­des­ics in cities that are con­stant­ly grow­ing and build­ing new build­ings, it’s impor­tant we take into account the begin­ning and through­out the whole oper­at­ing life cycle as well.”

Next to speak was Essel­man, who in his role at Aer­i­al Trans­porta­tion Solu­tions, is lead­ing an eco-sys­tem in Utah. Varon asked his what his point of view was in terms of the impact we are expect­ing from Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in cities.

Essel­man said: “I love the idea of geo­des­ics. For Utah, we took our vir­tu­al lanes and said what’s polit­i­cal­ly pal­lat­able? How do we con­nect these inter­modal points, what’s fea­si­ble and what is polit­i­cal­ly accept­ed by the peo­ple?

“We found tak­ing the road map and ele­vat­ing it by 4, 6, 800ft. They already accept trans­porta­tion along these routes, and accept that as a noise and pol­lu­tion con­duit. But one of the things we know that has to evolve is as build­ings and cities grow, we have to take into account for FAA pur­pos­es, the Part 77 Ser­vices of those inter­modal land­ing take­off oper­a­tion points.

“As an ecosys­tem, we don’t want to pre­vent new build­ings com­ing in, but want to design new approach and depar­ture paths into those geo­des­ics to allow for that new con­struc­tion to con­tin­ue, and still oper­ate a seam­less Urban Air Mobil­i­ty envi­ron­ment.”

Alon­so agreed with the points Essel­mann said about inter-modal con­nec­tions between dif­fer­ent mobil­i­ty choic­es, and that he thinks fly­ing cars will be anoth­er option.

“I think as city plan­ners, we always think about dif­fer­ent ‘what if’ sce­nar­ios and have the same issues with autonomous vehi­cles. If we look into the next 100 years, maybe all of the vehi­cles will be autonomous. It does­n’t mat­ter if they are fly­ing or in the mid­dle of the road.

But I’d like to look into the oth­er extreme sce­nario where maybe in less than 100 years — per­haps 50 — cars are going to be fly­ing and how is that going to shape the city. We are going to have what archi­tects call ‘Ver­ti­cal Cities’ and this kind of mul­ti-modal infra­struc­ture is going to be need­ed in a way that is also ver­ti­cal, because when you shift from a bus to a tier sta­tion you have to move in a ver­ti­cal direc­tion, and that’s already a chal­lenge in some cities.

“I’m also very inter­est­ed in pri­va­cy issues as well, depend­ing on how high the flight is. So maybe they could fly at the same height as the build­ings. As a city plan­ner, the idea of think­ing how these ver­ti­cal cities are going to be is amaz­ing, what are the streets going to look like if we remove the cars. Will they be just for humans, or are we going to have dif­fer­ent lev­els in the city? It’s very excit­ing and opens up a long con­ver­sa­tion.”

Giv­ing his thoughts, Sher­man agreed that defin­ing spe­cif­ic routes is a great idea and allows met­rics to be tak­en along the way to see how the first air­crafts intro­duced are doing. But he advised that cau­tion needs to be met as not all of the air­craft will be trav­el­ling at the same speed.

“You’ve got the Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty vehi­cle which will trav­el at a cer­tain enve­lope at a cer­tain speed, and then the Joby one trav­el­ling along­side it might be a bit faster, so we need to mon­i­tor how those routes are defined. I like the idea of defin­ing routes along pre-defined trans­porta­tion net­work, which is a good thing.

“We have a lot of com­mu­ni­ty issues to deal with and noise is one of them, so if we start off where there is a fair amount of ambi­ent noise, we kind of fall into the back­ground noise so that’s going to key for get­ting pub­lic accep­tance. That also helps to reduce some of the risk on the ground too.

“As much as we want to put 10 to the minus 9 safe­ty on these vehi­cles them­selves, there are some addi­tion­al risks and there will be the like­li­hood of some crash­es. Putting these vehi­cle routes over areas where we lim­it the risk is going to be a key aspect.

“And it’s also how we man­age these routes from oth­er unin­tend­ed con­se­quences — we have a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of drones fly­ing, how do we keep them out of our space or at least avoid them along the way. There’s a lot of good things we need to talk about, and also a lot of risks that need to be addressed, and start­ing with defined routes is a very good way to do that.”

The next think tank will be on Fri­day, 2nd Octo­ber from 12noon to 1pm EDT, and focus on Inno­va­tions in Insur­ance. To reg­is­ter for this ses­sion, and watch the full record­ings of pre­vi­ous think tanks, vis­it www.varonvehicles.com/skyscraper.