José Alexandre T. Guerreiro Fregnani & José Carlos Furuzawa
Urban Air Mobility Simplified Vehicle Operation
Air Mobility (UAM) refers to urban transportation systems that move people by air in response to traffic congestions, mainly intracity passenger transport, at lower and competitive costs when compared with other terrestrial vehicles. For that, new designs of Electrical Vertical Takeoff and Landing Vehicles (eVTOLs) have been developed by legacy OEMs and new players in the industry, considering high advanced automated systems (on-board and on-ground) to support operational scenarios with much denser air traffic than nowadays. According to FAA’s predictions, hundreds of vehicles would be sharing the low altitude airspace simultaneously in metropolitan airspace within the next decades. Thus, a massive number of qualified pilots would be needed to support such vehicle’s demand in the initial years of operations.
The Simplified Vehicle Operations (SVO) concept refers to the use of automation coupled with human factors best practices to optimize the overall quantity of trained skills, knowledge, and attitudes that the pilot or operator of an aircraft must acquire to operate the system at the required level of operational safety.
Therefore, this new approach on pilots training has been discussed as a suitable and safe solution for UAM’s pilots’ upcoming demand. On its basis the SVO represents the deconstruction of the functions (or skills) that pilots are trained to accomplish today.
EVE’s approach for SVO training developments is phased and considers the evolution of levels of vehicle’s autonomy. The balance between highly automated systems and pilot competencies will be key to support higher density operations expected for eVTOLs along the first years of operations. EVE and Embraer consider the SVO training concept as an intelligent way to train the large number of pilots necessary to feed the eVTOL operations in the coming years.
