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An artist’s conception of an urban air mobility environment with various unmanned aircraft within a city.
Artist illustration of various unmanned aircraft concepts in flight. In the foreground is a city vehicles and in the background is the rural areas.
Performing shakedown tests with drones in Reno, Nevada.

Air Mobility Pathfinders Project

Air Mobility Pathfinders will tackle one of the most important challenges in the Advanced Air Mobility industry – researching how to safely integrate emerging electric air taxi technologies into cities and the national airspace system to help revolutionize air transportation.
 
This project’s research will help accelerate the industry’s development of this innovative system of aircraft and technologies to move people and cargo safely to and around metropolitan areas while remaining connected to established forms of regional transport like subways, busses, ride-share services, and cars.
 
Through a series of technical capabilities evaluations with government and industry partners, researchers will collect data to create and test a reference architecture, or blueprint, for safe, secure, and scalable Urban Air Mobility operations which supports public good, and fosters U.S. aeronautics leadership worldwide.

Learn More About the AMP Project about Air Mobility Pathfinders Project

PROJECT MANAGER

Karen Cate

DEPUTY PROJECT MANAGER

Rudy Aquilina

deputy project manager, technology

Ken Goodrich

Chief Engineer (Acting)

Jim Murphy

Emerging Aviation Markets

Illustration of a drone in silhouette against a red, smoke-filled sky

Emergency Response Operations

NASA’s Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations project – led by the agency’s Ames Research Center in California – is using drones and advanced aviation technologies to improve wildland fire coordination and operations.

Artist illustration showing how to implement a Safety Re-Route due to adverse weather predicted.

Safety is Paramount

The System-Wide Safety project is developing a new technology called the In-time Aviation Safety Management System, which will automate safety assurance and risk management functions performed manually today.

Artist illustration showing a parking garage for advanced air mobility vehicles. It shows landing zones as well as Gate 1 and 2.

Building the Infrastructure

NASA researchers are considering the network infrastructure required so these aircraft can digitally communicate with each other and traffic management services, as well as brick and mortar infrastructure such as candidate landing surfaces.