Under the terms of the deal, the planemaker’s subsidiary, Eve Urban Air Mobility, will provide aviation taxi platform Ascent with access to 100 of its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

Ascent hopes to use its 100,000 allocated hours of flying time to service the Victorian capital. Other locations selected are Bangkok, Manila, Singapore, and Tokyo as soon as 2026.

The business’ platform is currently used to book helicopters, but it has long-planned to transition to eVTOLs.

The new deal expands on an earlier partnership between the two, penned in June. This deal focused on accelerating the development of the Urban Air Mobility ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific.

“Ascent is one of the greatest players of Urban Air Mobility in the Asia-Pacific and its strong presence in the region makes it an ideal partner for Eve’s operations,” said Andre Stein, president and CEO of Eve.

“The region holds a massive demand for transportation disruption that can be filled with our low-emission aircraft. This is the right recipe for sustainable growth.”

Embraer’s Eve has developed both a zero-emission low noise eVTOL vehicles as well an Urban Air Traffic Management (UATM) system. Both are currently being trialled in conjunction with the UK Civil Aviation Authority.

The news comes after Eve and Airservices Australia announced their own partnership in December 2020. They revealed the initial concept of operations (CONOPS) for the flying taxi market in Melbourne.

The partnership also hopes to aid in the development of Eve’s UATM solutions. Australia’s government support of UAM solutions, and strong aviation safety record helped seal the deal.

“The creation of the UAM ecosystem requires innovative solutions, which is also a fundamental pillar of Embraer’s growth strategy for the coming years, and EmbraerX was built to address these needs,” said Daniel Moczydlower, president and CEO of EmbraerX, of which Eve is its first spin-off.

“We are jointly embarking on the first steps toward Australia becoming one of the world’s first Urban Air Mobility markets.”

The Flying Taxi to become a reality

Using the City of Melbourne as a model, the CONOPS examines how existing air traffic management solutions can enable UAM operations. There is simultaneous preparation for scale of operations through new traffic management technologies.

“This exciting initiative combines Airservices’ experience as the national airspace manager with the technical innovation of Embraer,” said Peter Curran, chief customer experience and strategy officer at Airservices.

“We have the responsibility of keeping our skies safe, and we are excited to leverage our significant expertise and operational capabilities in airspace management and partner with a global aviation expert to develop innovative solutions that ensure safe and equitable access to the urban airspace for a broad spectrum of aircraft, including conventional helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and eVTOL aircraft.”

Lionel Sinai-Sinelnikoff, founder and CEO of Ascent, said, “Eve’s innovative technology, combined with its manufacturing expertise and global servicing footprint through Embraer, comfort us in bringing a solution fitting the region’s complex requirements.

“With Ascent operating system onboarding Eve’s fleet and connected to Eve’s UATM, air operator partners will be empowered to elevate UAM operations at scale.”

The post Look up in the Sky – It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, NO it’s a Flying Taxi! appeared first on Country Airstrips Australia.

In the past couple of decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged from academia into the mainstream. It is now being used in a number of applications and sectors, including air travel. AI’s ability to learn by experience means that it can be trained for any task or job within an organization. Even one as complex as aviation. As this technology becomes increasingly powerful, how will it impact the business of air travel? This article explores some possibilities.

AI is becoming more common and much more powerful. The travel industry has been slow to adopt AI, but it is catching on. There are a number of benefits that artificial intelligence can offer air travellers –

• Making reservations easier,
• Checking flight status or
• Finding the best deals for flights.

Although in its infancy, there are new technologies such as chatbots that can be used at airports. They will save time by eliminating check-ins and other lines before you board your plane.

This technology offers many advantages over traditional methods. For example customer service representatives who cannot keep up with demand due to high call volume.

Chatbots have features such as FAQs which make them faster than calling a customer service representative.

Some of the advantages of AI in aviation

There are other ways that AI will affect the future of air travel, as well. Airports are already using AI to predict flight arrivals and departures times with surprising accuracy. This can help reduce wait time for passengers when they land at an airport.

Flight arrival services too can benefit from the use of AI, which is currently being used to reduce the wait time for passengers and ground crew alike.

Predictions show that by 2035 there could be as many as three billion passengers flying each year around the world. That means airports are going to need help dealing with all these people. AI will also play a major role in helping airlines deal with this increasing demand. It can help forecast air travel patterns more accurately than humans ever could. AI-based systems are already predicting flight delays before they happen, improving customer service during high traffic periods like Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

Artificial intelligence won’t be replacing human workers anytime soon. Instead it will supplement them by taking on busy work so that employees can focus on tasks that require emotional labor or creativity. With this new technology coming into the airline industry every day, how long until we see an entirely automated airport?

Can aircraft design and maintenance be impacted by AI? Will AI assist with flight planning, takeoff, and landing? There are already companies investigating these possibilities, and it is possible that AI will be more common in flight planning sooner than we might imagine.

Would you fly in a pilot-less aircraft?

Will aircraft pilots soon be replaced by sentient computers? Do you think the flying public are ready for this? Will it make air travel more affordable, or safer??

After all, one of the primary reasons people avoid flying is because of the fear that they’re going to crash. But if you could install a computer on an airplane that was as intelligent and competent (or better) than a human being, wouldn’t this significantly reduce your chances of crashing?

You might think “but hey – isn’t there still at least some manual control needed?” Well, in fact not really. The automated system can take over responsibility for much of what happens outside the cockpit. This includes communication with other aircraft and ground stations, monitoring hazards such as weather conditions or traffic, and even landing the aircraft.

You might be wondering how we know that it is safe to delegate so much responsibility to a computer? Well, in fact there are already some fully automated systems flying commercially! That’s right, you could fly from Singapore to New York with no human pilot aboard. In this particular case, the flight was piloted by an AI system developed by US company “SenseFly” (a subsidiary of eSpatial) which has been used for years on manned drones but not yet on commercial passenger flights due to safety certification requirements.

Conclusion

There are major technological advancements in aviation occurring all over the world. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and augmented reality are just some of the emerging technologies that will change the aviation industry as we know it today.

Will advancements in AI make pilots redundant? It is predicted there will be a shortage of 500,000 commercial pilots globally by 2037. In response to this impending crisis, earlier this year Rolls Royce’s Chief Technology Officer announced their plans to introduce an artificially intelligent pilot into service by 2030 – with a target date of 2025 for passenger jets too small to have flight decks.

AI will surely play a huge role in shaping the future of aviation. From intelligent flight control systems to augmented reality for pilots, innovations are bound to keep coming. AI has already brought crucial safety to commercial aircraft by detecting defects on inspections faster than anyone else can.

The future is bright for AI approaches in aviation and we’re only just beginning our exploration into what this technology is capable of doing! Expect plenty more developments coming your way about this very exciting field as research ramps up.

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The general public tends to be comfortable with a certain amount of automation in their lives. Frequent fliers understand that there are two pilots in the cockpit of the plane. But those human aviators are relying on autopilot for routine parts of the flight. A commercial airliner can even land itself if needed, although it’s bothersome for the pilots to set up that process. Military drones were designed from the ground up to fly with no-one on board—a concept that now is pretty normal. 

What might seem a little scarier is the idea of taking a regular aircraft like a King Air—a two-engine turboprop—and converting it to fly totally autonomously, with no humans on board. A new outfit called Merlin Labs has announced a plan to do just that with Virginia-based company Dynamic Aviation. Merlin has been testing their system in the Mojave Desert since 2019, albeit with a safety pilot on the plane. 

“What we’re developing is hardware and software that takes big traditional airplanes, at least right now, [and] enables them to fly autonomously,” says Matthew George, the CEO and founder of Merlin Labs. “But in the future, what we’re building truly is a digital pilot—it could be applied to future types of aircraft that don’t exist yet.” While they’ve used their system on different models of planes, their newest and biggest focus is on the King Air, specifically the 90 series. 

The company’s goal is for the system to be able to handle all the tasks a human pilot might execute, “from takeoff to touchdown,” George says. They’re also hoping to achieve FAA certification, which is the stamp of approval needed for a company to use the new tech to charge for services, like flying cargo. 

[Related: This surprisingly common flight issue contributed to Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash]

He emphasizes that they’re not developing a system where humans are remotely flying the aircraft from the ground, like what happens with the MQ-9 Reaper. In those cases, the link between the aircraft and the terrestrial world below is mission-critical. The Merlin system is different. “We believe the autonomy needs to be on the aircraft,” George says, adding that a person on the ground would be “monitoring, but not the primary controller of the aircraft.” He explains that a single person might even watch over multiple missions from terra-firma at once. 

The plane’s autonomy extends to being able to touch base with authorities on the ground. “We believe the aircraft itself needs to do all the functions that a human pilot does, and that absolutely includes communicating with air traffic control,” he says. 

All of this could enable a totally uncrewed aircraft to execute missions that are, as George puts, “dull, dirty, dangerous.” With its deal with Dynamic Aviation, Merlin is working with an aviation company that, according to its website, has over 140 airplanes and carries out tasks like ISR flights (that stands for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) and data collection. Merlin will be retrofitting a whopping 55 of their aircraft for autonomy. “Those aircraft are used for a wide variety of missions—everything from helping fighting fires in California, to agricultural missions, all the way to providing geospatial data for the federal government,” George says. 

It’s hard to picture a robot airplane doing something tricky like fighting a fire—something humans do with tanker planes—but flying around and keeping a lookout makes more sense. George ticks off “fire surveillance” as one mission, and “maritime patrol” as another. Those offshore patrols, he notes, are one way that the US government could save money and keep humans safely on the ground. 

Thinking about an airplane being used in this way—a boring surveillance flight over the ocean—makes more sense than a large pilotless commercial aircraft with passengers on board. Even George, who leads a company focused on aviation autonomy, doesn’t see that happening. “I don’t think that there is a world in which there is an unmanned 737 carrying passengers,” he says. A more sensible step up from an autonomous King Air could be a larger plane, hauling cargo, with just one human pilot and a supplemental Merlin copilot. Or perhaps a smaller uncrewed plane with a Merlin system on board could help fulfil ecommerce orders. 

[Related: Joby’s electric aircraft inches us closer to a future full of flying taxis]

And then there are questions about safety. What if one of the airplane’s two engines failed—could the digital pilot handle it? George says that that’s where predetermined emergency procedures help out, as checklists already exist for how to handle scenarios like those. “That’s something we’re thinking a lot about,” he adds, to “integrate that into autonomy.” 

Even if the plane’s flight takes it mostly over water or other uninhabited areas, it could still presumably pose a risk to people on the ground if an incident occurred around takeoff or landing. Could the AI scope out a spot to land as safely as possible if it couldn’t reach a runway? “We’re actively thinking about that and working with the regulator to try to define what the art of the possible is,” George says. (Upshot of dealing with a totally empty airplane: you could hypothetically divert it into the ocean.) 

And while a human pilot can use their eyes to scope out hazards like power lines, a robot aviator (or the human monitoring the flight from the ground) would need to rely on onboard cameras or sensors. “Once again we’re still working on it with the regulator,” he notes, mentioning “a video feed and likely also other types of sensor feeds as well.” 

Ultimately, the push for autonomy is just one big theme in aviation innovation right now, with other related concepts being electric air taxis (which also could be highly automated) that will someday, just maybe, whisk people around cities—perhaps without a human pilot in control. 

Article from Popular Science Magazine

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