VFS 6th Infrastructure Workshop tackles Vertiport Site Selection

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) 6th Work­shop on advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) Infra­struc­ture will be held on 20–22 Sep­tem­ber 2022 at the Mar­riott in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Day­ton, Ohio.

VFS Infra­struc­ture Advi­sor Rex Alexan­der said: “The over­all theme for this year’s two-day infra­struc­ture work­shop will be cen­tered around the recent­ly pub­lished ‘Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Ver­ti­port Con­sid­er­a­tions: A List and Overview’ NASA whitepa­per.”

A direct prod­uct of NASA’s AAM Ecosys­tem Work­ing Groups pro­gramme, the whitepa­per out­lines over 500 dif­fer­ent con­sid­er­a­tions for eval­u­at­ing and deter­min­ing ver­ti­port site selec­tion devel­oped and com­piled by near­ly a hun­dred experts.

VFS will con­duct six attendee break­out brain­storm­ing ses­sions on Day 1; audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion ses­sions, led by indus­try lead­ers and experts designed to per­form a deep dive into six crit­i­cal areas.

These areas include infra­struc­ture cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, equi­ty con­sid­er­a­tions, ver­ti­port con­fig­u­ra­tion, safe­ty man­age­ment sys­tems, ver­ti­port archi­tec­tur­al and engi­neer­ing pro­gram­ing, and ver­ti­port air­space.

On Day 2, atten­dees will be giv­en a back-brief on each of the brain­storm­ing ses­sions from ses­sion lead­ers.

Alexan­der added: “We hope to pro­vide insight and guid­ance as to what our pri­or­i­ties for AAM infra­struc­ture need to be based on the results from the Day 1 brain­storm­ing ses­sions and where research dol­lars should be direct­ed going for­ward.”

The work­shop will con­duct sev­er­al pan­el dis­cus­sion lead by indus­try lead­ers on top­ics that include bat­tery charg­ing infra­struc­ture, local per­spec­tives, inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tives, and hydro­gen infra­struc­ture at air­ports and ver­ti­ports.

The tar­get audi­ence for the work­shop is fair­ly broad but at the same time heav­i­ly
geared towards fed­er­al, state and local deci­sion mak­ers who will be respon­si­ble for the devel­op­ment of AAM infra­struc­ture poli­cies, reg­u­la­tions, ordi­nances and codes.

This includes such groups as the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA), state depart­ments of trans­porta­tion, local plan­ning and zon­ing com­mis­sions, and city trans­porta­tion heads.

On Day 3, VFS will host a tour of the Spring­field-Beck­ley Munic­i­pal Air­port, high­lights of which include the Beta Tech­nolo­gies Portable Ver­ti­port, Beta Tech­nolo­gies Sim­u­la­tor, Fly­Ohio Com­mu­ni­ty Ver­ti­port Chal­lenge, the Ohio UAS Cen­ter, Agili­ty Prime Pro­gram Dis­play, and the Moog Sure­Fly eVTOL air­craft.

Spon­sors of the event are Woolpert, Par­al­lax Advanced Research, PS&S and VPorts.