Case Study

Urban Air Mobility

Challenge

With traditional surface traffic congestion levels (e.g., downtown traffic, highway traffic) surrounding highly populated urban areas, industry is driving towards high volume Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations that are not currently supported by the NAS infrastructure. The FAA needs an approach to harmonize UAM with traditional aviation operations, minimize disruptions to current flight patterns, and minimize impact to traditional ATC.

Solution

Cavan Solutions was awarded a contract to support the FAA’s NextGen Office and assembled a team of subject matter experts in Systems Engineering, Air Traffic Control, Human Factors, and programmatic experience to define the operational concept to lead the integration of UAM into the NAS. The team engineered the FAA’s initial UAM Concept of Operations to enable near-term UAM operations and ready the airspace for industry’s emerging vehicle technologies.

Cavan Solutions assisted the FAA’s NexGen office in extending the concepts developed by building additional use case scenarios, conceptual architecture, data exchanges and information flows, and design and analysis of airspace for UAM operations. With these revolutionary accomplishments, Cavan Solutions has set the stage to drive UAM operations into the future.

Results

These efforts provide the foundation for incorporating UAM operations into the NAS while minimizing the impact to ATC and ATM operations and maintaining safety.