Moving From Piloted to Autonomous Operations: Investigating Human Factors Challenges in Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is expected to be the next major revolution in the aviation industry and a solution to the growing traffic congestion on the ground. The long-term goal of UAM is to reach fully autonomous operations with minimal to no human supervision. Transitioning from today’s piloted to fully autonomous operations while maintaining or exceeding the current safety level in commercial aviation will require sig-nificant advances in technology and extensive collaboration between government, industry, and community stakeholders. In this paper, we discuss results from a focus group aimed at capturing the perspectives of five subject matter experts on the challenges associated with transitioning to fully autonomous operations. The focus group revealed five major themes for future research: overall system and automation design, training, system safety and security, community and, regulations and policy. The findings from this research highlight gaps in technology, regulations and our understanding of large-scale complex systems.

Challenges to the Operational Safety and Security of eVTOL Aircraft in Metropolitan Regions: A Literature Review

“…In this way, it will be possible to increase the capacity of airspaces. In addition, according to Panesar et al [12], it will be necessary for operators of cellular telephony services to act collaboratively to ensure secure and continuous datalink communications at peak times so that they are available during the occurrence of some disruption emergency.…”

“…Moreover, to reduce pilots' workload in more mature operational environments with higher traffic densities and ensure an acceptable level of safety for operations, it is required to introduce a level of automation that monitors the conformation of trajectories, the protection envelopes, and the performance of aircraft sensors. However, according to Panesar et al [12], additional navigation support infrastructure should be developed so that it is not needed to use only GNSS. This navigation support infrastructure will create a security buffer to deal with high-pressure scenarios with high traffic demand.…”

“…Another fact accepted in aviation is that achieving an absolute level of operational safety is impossible since a total avoidance of failures and errors is unachievable [11]. Any complex and large-scale systems will exhibit failures or unexpected behavior at some point because of unpredictable or not understood interactions between their components [12].…”