NASA’s vision for Air Mobility Pathfinders (AMP) is to help emerging aviation markets to safely develop an air transportation system that moves people and cargo between places previously not served or underserved by aviation – local, regional, intraregional, urban – using revolutionary new aircraft that are only just now becoming possible. AMP includes NASA’s work on Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and will provide substantial benefit to U.S. industry and the public.
The AMP project will enable these markets by being a community catalyst and developing and validating system-level concepts and solutions both within AMP and in coordination with other Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate projects that have a role related to enabling UAM.
These ARMD projects are:
Air Traffic Management — eXploration
Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology
Flight Demonstration and Capabilities
Transformational Tools and Technologies
The AMP project, meanwhile, is organized to include this technical content and approaches:
Automated Flight and Contingency Management subproject
Develops validated UAM System Architectures and research findings to support standards for vehicle and pilot interface systems enabling “collaborative and responsible” automation.
High-Density Vertiplex subproject
Develops a prototype High Density Vertiplex to assess scalable and efficient aircraft operations, flight and airspace management procedures, and interoperability of capabilities needed to support AMP operations.
To identify and address the challenges ahead, NASA plans to host a National Campaign to promote public confidence in AMP safety and facilitate community-wide learning while capturing the public’s imagination. The National Campaign is a series of events that seeks to challenge the industry to execute progressively more difficult ecosystem-wide systems level safety and integration scenarios, demonstrate practical and scalable system concepts and build a knowledge base for requirements and standards. The goal of the National Campaign series is to improve AMP safety and accelerate scalability through integrated demonstrations of candidate operational concepts and scenarios.
