The FAA has for a very long time had an urban mobility initiative, of which I am not aware of any actual regulatory progress until the past decade.
B+ for effort. In general, the FAA is only one portion of the UAM concept and didn’t really get involved until the early 2000’s when they developed the NextGen initiative. At its core, UAM is an urban planning concept that dates back decades with urban planners, NASA, and a few others involved.
The issue for long term city planners was the lack of transportation expansion options within high density urban areas, and it was decided a long time ago that up was the only viable expansion option in most cases. It wasn’t until the first commercial helicopters came on the scene that those urban planners actually had a means to move people vertically above the streets.
However, helicopters presented their own problems and by the late 70s regular scheduled service stopped and was replaced by a more on-demand model in select cities. The only place where helicopters did succeed in UAM was in Sao Paulo BR which have 400+ helicopters that operate scheduled and on-demand flights within the metro urban area.
In 1996, NASA did a real-world test in Atlanta to determine if street-level UAM ops were actually possible with helicopters, and if not, what type of aircraft or technology it would take to accomplish that. In the end, it was determined helicopters could not provide that service and that a new type of aircraft technology was required to perform the mission which NASA started designing in the early 2000s.
The breakthrough came in 2010 with the development of NASA’s distributed electric propulsion (DEP) technology. And with that, Joby, Archer, and many others started to develop eVTOL aircraft around DEP to create a viable, street-level, urban center based, transportation system to meet the requirements of long established UAM concept. So when those prototypes started to fly, the FAA and EASA moved to the next phase and developed multiple regulatory foundations to certify, operate, and manage this new class of powered-lift aircraft.
And as I mentioned earlier, the long-term endgame for eVTOLs and UAM ops is a
public-based, urban transportation system that will provide the long-needed expansion outlet for city planners as the global city centers steadily increase in population. This is why you have seen $billions spent in investments by the top transportation related companies in the world, as this new aircraft design finally reaches fruition. And if you were to follow the UAM/eVTOL industry projections on market value and growth it gives the reasons why everyone wants a piece of this pie.
So, from an economic standpoint, once the technology and operational side mature, these eVTOLs and their future generations will be more on par with city buses, subways, and other similar public transport modes vs standalone aircraft taxi ops we see today. Pretty interesting stuff from what I’ve seen.
how is the FAA going to regulate the commercial carrying of passengers. Look what Part 121/135 requires currently.
Joby and Archer already have their Part 135 certificate and once they complete certification, they will finish up adding the eVTOLs to their OpsSpecs and start flying for hire just as any other operator. The big difference being, eVTOLs will be flying where no other 135 operator can.
electrek.co
. Which obviously hurts the business plan to operate in dense urban environments. This means the heliports will need landing strips and not just a helipad. I don't know how this gets engineered out with modern day battery limitations. You can only add but so many rotors and reduce the MTOW but so much before they're not economically feasible.
