Pilots’ willingness to operate in urban air mobility integrated airspace: a moderated mediation analysis

Abstract

Interest in advanced air mobility (AAM) and urban air mobility (UAM) operations for on-demand passenger and cargo transport continues to grow. There is ongoing research on market demand and forecast, community acceptance, privacy, and security. There is also ongoing research by NASA, FAA, academia, and industry on airspace integration, regulatory, process, and procedural challenges. Safe integration of UAM and AAM will also require different stakeholder perspectives such as air traffic controllers, manned aircraft pilots, remote pilots, UAM operators, and the community. This research aimed to assess the willingness of manned aircraft pilots to operate in UAM integrated airspace based on airspace complexity and UAM automation level. In addition, a moderated mediation analysis was conducted using trust and perceived risk as mediators and operator type as a moderating variable. The results indicated that automation level influenced pilots’ willingness to operate an aircraft in integrated airspace. A moderating effect of operation type on automation level and willingness to pilot an aircraft was also observed: professional pilots were more amenable to UAM operations with a pilot on-board compared to remotely piloted operations. Results from the study are expected to inform airspace integration challenges, processes, and procedures for UAM integrated operations.

Objective Detection of Trust in Automated Urban Air Mobility: A Deep Learning-Based ERP Analysis

“…Additionally, the criteria for ethics are unclear, such as how automation should set priorities when continuing to drive may threaten other lives but swerving may threaten the lives of the onboard passengers [18]. Hence, it is generally believed that achieving the Collaborative and Responsible level could be gradually realized in the next few decades [19]. Hence, this study mainly focuses on detecting trust in automation at the Collaborative and Responsible level.…”