During a visit to Skyryse in late 2022, HAI President and CEO James Viola flew the FlightOS demonstrator, testing the technology’s ability to simplify piloting a helicopter. (Skyryse Photo)
conventional fly-by-wire system or an avionics suite,” Groden adds. “Te category a lot of folks put us in is ‘simplified vehicle operations.’ ”
Higher-Level Decision-Making FlightOS is targeted to help eradicate the biggest killers in the helicopter industry and, more widely, general aviation: controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), unintended flight into instrument meteorological conditions (UIMC), and aircraft loss of control. “Tese are things that we nearly make an impossibility with our technology stack,” Groden says. After his experience flying the Skyryse helicopter, Viola
was impressed, commenting that the fly-by-wire aircraft flew just like his own R44. He also saw FlightOS’s potential to improve safety in general aviation. “It’s got a lot of capability,” Viola says. “Te NTSB rec- ommends you fly IFR if you’re carrying passengers. Te ability this system brings to do that all the time is there, and it’s there today.” Viola notes that the root of many of the vertical aviation
industry’s safety challenges lies in inadequate aeronautical decision-making (ADM). New, advanced capabilities in aircraft don’t change the need for good decision-making in the air, but they may free pilots to focus on doing that. Asked about the Skyryse system’s impact on ADM,
Groden says, “Right now, people are required to make the decisions at very high levels and very low levels. You’re making a decision in real time, almost all the time, about keeping yourself safely inside the flight envelope. What we try to do is take the aviate part off the table so you can focus on the higher-level decision-making, where we think [the
pilot is] best leveraged to maximize the safety of the flight. You still have full authority. You still have full control over the aircraft, but you’re not actively stick-and-rudder working to control the aircraft to keep it on a trajectory and keep it safely in the sky.” FlightOS is based not only on Skyryse’s operational and
flight test experience, but also on that of other companies. In its seven years, Skyryse’s team has included transportation experts from Airbus, Boeing, Ford, General Atomics, JetBlue, Moog, SpaceX, Tesla, Uber, the US military, and the Amazon autonomous-vehicle subsidiary Zoox.
Proof of Concept Since its inception, Skyryse has been busy developing and testing the technology that it hopes will eliminate general aviation fatalities. On Mar. 29, 2017, the company flew one of the first
55-lb.–plus uncrewed VTOL aircraft. Te next year, Skyryse employed a Robinson R44 (fitted with enhanced vision using radar and a 360-degree camera system) in partnership with the City of Tracy, California, for that government’s air ambulance service. In 2019, Skyryse operated a high-volume, full-service, multimodal, door-to-door Part 135 air taxi service in the Los Angeles area. Groden says undertaking traditional helicopter operations
was a key element of Skyryse’s strategy. “We’ve taken the time and gone through the process of really understanding what the end users need in order to be successful,” he says. In 2020, the company signed with Robinson to demon-
strate FlightOS on its aircraft. Robinson Helicopter President Kurt Robinson confirmed that his company has been
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