(dynamic music)
- [Miles] A billion people flying air taxis?
How could that be safe?
(dynamic music)
At NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley,
they're tackling the air traffic control challenge.
That's what led me here,
to the legendary vertical motion simulator.
Once upon a time, space shuttle astronauts
honed their landing skills here.
There's nothing like it anywhere else.
- Back on a light slope.
- And now NASA is using it to understand
how to devise a safe air traffic control system
for advanced air mobility.
Hey Gordon, how are you?
- [Gordon] Hey, great, Miles.
- Let's go eVTOL flying, shall we?
- [Gordon] Good to see you.
Yeah, hop in. - Nice to see you.
Before the pandemic, veteran NASA test pilot Gordon Hardy
gave me a glimpse of the future.
- All right, computer's ready, cockpit's ready.
- Operate.
- So we're over San Francisco on a nice sunny day.
So I'm trying to imagine this city
with hundreds of these aircraft buzzing around it.
- [Gordon] (laughs) Yeah.
- What's that gonna be like?
- Yeah, yeah.
- And hopefully not hitting each other
nor falling out of the sky.
- [Miles] Exactly.
But the world that Gordon is helping NASA create
is designed to work without pilots like him.
Eventually autonomous air taxis will need to safely fly
to and from convenient places, taking off, navigating,
landing, and dealing with emergencies all on their own.
It's a complex problem.
- So we should see it bank soon.
- [Miles] In another building, not far away,
engineers are immersed in a 360-degree
virtual depiction of the city, watching us fly.
- We're tracking UAM 003 currently.
That's the vertical motion simulator.
- All right. Looks good, and the speed is okay?
- [Miles] Sandy Lozito is chief
of the aviation systems division.
- We have to think about all of those vehicles
being in the airspace at the same time,
different performance parameters,
potentially different training
for the ones that are piloted,
and then how do we make sure that everything stays safe?
- [Miles] In this world,
the idea of a control tower is outdated.
- Looks like we've got the VMS going up and over the bridge.
- Yeah, that's working
perfectly. - All right.
- [Miles] Before Covid, there were more
than 45,000 flights every day in the US.
It's an intricate symphony, precisely conducted
by air traffic controllers.
- EMS, are you good?
- [Miles] But if eVTOLs take off,
there will be a lot more players.
- We do not necessarily expect
a centralized air traffic control tower
to do it with individual directives
telling the pilots how to come in and out of the vertiport.
And so that's a very different operation.
There could be much more independence
on the part of the pilots and the individual operators
as they move in and out of these areas.
- [Miles] Independence?
It sounds like a prescription for disaster.
But NASA has been working on this for the past few years,
on smaller drones that don't carry people.
The lessons learned writing those rules
are offering them a foundation.
- So these would be its operations, right?
Coming in around here and landing here on top of this.
- [Miles] Shivanjli Sharma
is an aerospace research engineer at Ames.
She and her team are using data from the simulations
to write the algorithms
that will allow air traffic control to be digital,
more automated, and distributed.
- The goal would be to share information
with other operators and folks like the FAA
to make sure that everybody in the airspace
knows where one another really is flying.
- [Miles] In flight, an air taxi
would continuously transmit its location
to receivers on the ground.
- As that vehicle is flying, we're monitoring its position
in relation to that four-dimensional volume.
Are they inside that volume?
Are they outside of that volume?
Are they in that volume
at the time they predicted they would be?
- [Miles] There are many hurdles.
At low altitudes in cities,
GPS and cellular signals can be unreliable.
And what about security?
Transmitting all this mission-critical,
life-and-death information across shared cloud networks
offers its own set of risks.
And there's one other big challenge.
This new air traffic control scheme
needs to work safely alongside the old one.
- If there are tubes in the sky
or particular lanes of airspace
in which these vehicles may transport,
we know that at some point they're gonna be
near conventional aircraft, commercial aircraft,
and we have to make sure that those can work together
or can compliment one another.