VFS 6th Workshop on AAM Infrastructure 2022

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) is host­ing its 6th Work­shop on advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) infra­struc­ture from 20 to 22 Sep­tem­ber in Day­ton, Ohio.

This year’s work­shop will be based on the recent col­lab­o­ra­tive work con­duct­ed by the NASA AAM Ecosys­tem Com­mu­ni­ty Inte­gra­tion Work­ing Group on ‘Ver­ti­port Loca­tion Con­sid­er­a­tions’.

This effort iden­ti­fied some 445 con­sid­er­a­tions which will be pre­sent­ed in a white paper, ‘Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Ver­ti­port Con­sid­er­a­tions: A List and Overview’, at this year’s Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Aero­nau­tics and Astro­nau­tics (AIAA) Avi­a­tion Forum in Chica­go.

The objec­tives are to pro­vide an open forum to stake­hold­ers and inter­est­ed par­ties from indus­try and applic­a­ble gov­ern­ment and reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies to dis­cuss oper­a­tions and safe­ty require­ments and expec­ta­tions as they relate to AAM tech­nol­o­gy and infra­struc­ture.

This includes dis­cus­sions regard­ing key oper­a­tional and safe­ty ques­tions per­tain­ing to AAM infra­struc­ture to bet­ter under­stand poten­tial eVTOL air­craft lim­i­ta­tions and aero­dy­nam­ic defi­cien­cies that must be con­sid­ered in future infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment.

The work­shop will iden­ti­fy col­lab­o­ra­tive research and devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties nec­es­sary for cre­at­ing safe infra­struc­ture design stan­dards based on air­craft per­for­mance cri­te­ria.

This will build upon exist­ing safe­ty data to iden­ti­fy pre-com­pet­i­tive areas where proac­tive indus­try col­lab­o­ra­tion would be valu­able in accel­er­at­ing adop­tion, and iden­ti­fy col­lab­o­ra­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties between indus­try and gov­ern­ment agen­cies that will ben­e­fit the UAM indus­try, as well as draft­ing con­sen­sus-based strate­gies to advance infra­struc­ture oper­a­tions and safe­ty at key fed­er­al, state and local lev­els.

Orga­niz­ers include Rex Alexan­der of 5‑Alpha, Cliff John­son of FAA Tech Cen­ter, Nan­cy Men­don­ca of NASA, Clint Harp­er of Urban Move­ment Labs, Dr Amber Wood­burn McNair of Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, Doug Sweet of Archi­tec­ture Tech­nol­o­gy Corp, Matilde D’Arpino of Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, Dr Fethi Chebil of Vports and Arturo Gar­cia-Alon­so of AVports.

The morn­ing ses­sion on 20th sep­tem­ber will include site selec­tion exer­cis­es part 1 and 2, fol­lowed by after­noon break­out ses­sions on cyber­se­cu­ri­ty issues and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of stan­dards and scope of guide­lines that need to be devel­oped in sup­port of site selec­tion. This will be fol­lowed by ses­sions on equi­ty con­sid­er­a­tions, ver­ti­port con­fig­u­ra­tions, SMS for ver­ti­ports and air­space con­sid­er­a­tions.

Morn­ing ses­sions on 21st Sep­tem­ber will include an overview of stan­dards in process, bat­ter­ies and bat­tery test­ing, local per­spec­tive and break­out ses­sion, fol­lowed in the after­noon by an inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive on ver­ti­ports and hydro­gen (H2) at air­ports and ver­ti­ports.

For the morn­ing ses­sion on 22nd Sep­tem­ber, busses will leave for Spring­field-Beck­ley Air­port for a tour of BETA Tech­nolo­gies portable ver­ti­port, BETA Tech­nolo­gies sim­u­la­tor, Fly­Ohio Com­mu­ni­ty Ver­ti­port Chal­lenge, Ohio UAS Cen­ter, Agili­ty Prime Pro­gram Dis­play, Moog Sure­Fly Vehi­cle and Spring­field-Beck­ley Air­port Future Devel­op­ment Plans.