Operational Control/Authority
Air traffic controllers are trained to, and expect to, speak to a trained professional on the other side of the microphone, such as a professional pilot. With the concept of autonomous flight, who commands the UAM vehicle? If it is a fleet operation, will there be a “flight controller/dispatch” office to phone or call on the radio? Or will controllers be speaking to ordinary citizens who just purchased their own private UAM to fly to grandma’s house? What about airframe separation? With projections of several fleet operators for each city/metro area, how many vehicles will be in the air at the same time? Will they follow local train/tram routes, or will they have their own preapproved routes assigned specifically to each machine? Will individual operators be able to “flight plan” unique routes or change them in-flight? Who hasn’t seen futuristic video simulations of flying machines picking up a person or a small group and whisking them off to a rooftop or landing pad somewhere in town? In those videos, there is one machine and perhaps one more in the distant background. Imagine 10 machines and 1,000 in the background, all vying for landing and routing priority. If these vehicles are to be used as or in place of taxis, buses, cars, metro trams, etc., who limits the quantity of operators? On the ground, those same transportation formats grow seemingly without restriction. Will the ground operators be replaced on a one-for-one basis, or will we simply add more machines to the urban transportation system, be they ground or air? These are heady questions indeed.
Currently, the FAA has a 500-foot AGL minimum altitude for airplanes and helicopters. Will that be lowered for these new machines? Imagine the morning rush with one or even two controllers in a nearby Class-Delta tower on duty from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. answering 2,000 to 3,000 individual requests/calls for transit approval, outside of the (hopefully) automated system for the rest of the fleets. The FAA can’t even get next-gen ATC up and running for a set of operators who are extensively and intensively trained on both sides of the microphone for aircraft that are tried and tested. Who will develop a system to monitor, track, and separate all these machines operated by your second cousin? I considered the new 5G cellular system. With some adjustments, the plethora of antennas could identify and locate each machine in real time to help avoid mid-air collisions. Even so, new minimum separation standards may demand even more airspace than some cities have available. In Denver, we have several GA airports in heavily populated areas that have their own airspace-sharing challenges. Will UAM vehicles be allowed to enter the control zone at will, and how does that affect traffic patterns? Who has priority, the city’s UAM? The Cessna 152 on downwind? Or the G6 turning base on a visual approach?
And none of this addresses the autonomy aspect of operators.
A subject I haven’t read about in any other article is bird strikes. With new lower altitudes over city boundaries, what is the increase in bird-strike potential? Airports have programs in place to mitigate the presence of birds using natural predators and repellents. Will cities now implement similar programs to keep all birds away from an entire city? Who becomes liable in the event of a bird strike over the city with a program in place? Those plans will certainly raise the ire of wildlife proponents. Richard Barber (richardbarber70@
gmail.com) of RHB Airport Consultancy Ltd. in the U.K. has decades of experience with this. If you want detailed information on wildlife risk mitigation, contact him.
rotorcraftpro.com 67
I think it now comes down to the “revolution” in RVLT. When JFK declared we would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, the technology didn’t even exist at the time, but it happened, and all the money came through the government. In this current case, private enterprise and entrepreneurship will drive the venture forward and the right vehicle will rise above the noise.
All above questions aside, whatever comes will surely be amazing
and...revolutionary.
Glenn Woodward is an ICAO Air Traffic Control Instructor and a TLA tactical applications specialist / consultant. Woodward may be reached at
1heloboss@gmail.com.
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