Research papers

Reachability Analysis for Multi-Rotor UAM Vehicles Based on Force and Moment Envelopes

To date, there are hundreds of concepts for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles under development. Most of these vehicles are over-actuated, meaning there are more control effectors than there are forces and moments to be …

eVTOL/AAM RPM Controlled rotor design process and research

This study focuses on the identification and optimization of key aerodynamic features in rotor blades, crucial for RPM control. The central aim is to develop an iterative blade-element optimization model, designed to enh…

eVTOL Aircraft Pilot Training, Certification, and Integration in the NAS

eVTOL Aircraft Pilot Training, Certification, and Integration in the NAS Presented by Samantha Brown & Todd Lisak As we approach a transformative era in aviation, powered-lift aircraft, particularly electric Vertical Tak…

The Sky is Falling… Or is it?

There are two sides to the issue of societal acceptance of advanced/urban air mobility when it comes to mental health. One is that of the pilots’ mental health, and a topic for another day.

Shaping AAM Educational Methods: A Comparison of Traditional and Compressed Class Schedules in UAS Classes.

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is a paradigm shift in the versatility of the aviation industry. The obvious benefits of this platform will revolutionize a variety of aspects of the industry.

Airline Pilot Perceptions of Stress and Self-Reported Fatigue: A Cross-Sectional Study

In the air transportation sector, fatigue is a known problem influencing safety. Over the past two decades, fatigue mitigation has gained increased regulatory emphasis.

Understanding Aviation Mental Health with Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Incident Reports

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a flourishing field that extends beyond mere predictions to clarify complex paradigms in aviation mental health, offering insights into the traces of mental health-related cas…

Clear Skies, Clear Minds: Navigating Mental Health Attitudes in Collegiate Aviation Education

This study explores the attitudes towards mental health within the aviation community, focusing on the perspectives of flight instructors and flight students within a university based part 141 program.

Flying Under the Radar: A Survey of Collegiate Pilots’ Mental Health to Identify Aeromedical Nondisclosure and Healthcare-Seeking Behaviors

The disclosure of a new or existing mental health condition in a pilot complicates their medical certification status. It has been proposed that the threat of losing medical certification often discourages pilots from se…

The Pilot Mental Health Campaign: A New Approach to Aviation Mental Health

The Pilot Mental Health Campaign (PMHC) is a non-partisan, grassroots organization committed to advocating for policy changes to make it easier for aviation personnel to receive timely and medically appropriate mental he…

Understanding Collegiate Aviation Pilot Mental Performance Studies and Future Research Opportunities

According to the Federal Aviation Administration (2022), fatigue is defined as “a condition characterized by increased discomfort with lessened capacity for work, reduced efficiency of accomplishment, loss of power or ca…

Tour-Based Network Design and Demand Forecasting for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM)

Tour-Based Network Design and Demand Forecasting for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Mohammed Almasabi, Dr. Yu Zhang, & Sasan Mahmoudinazlou Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) has emerged as an alternative urban transportation with…

A Structured Program for Pilots and Traffic Controllers with Mental Issues.

A Structured Program for Pilots and Traffic Controllers with Mental Issues. by Ian Blair Fries, M.D. Senior HIMS AME, MRO, SAP. Many pilots and controllers are avoiding appropriate mental care that would have to be repor…

Examination of Urban Air Mobility Integration into the National Airspace System

The Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) initiative aims to enhance air transportation for people and cargo in areas with limited aviation services.

Uncertainty and Assurance in AAM Regulation

The regulatory environment of aviation safety has played an important role in establishing the current outstanding safety performance of the air transportation industry.

Identifying Stereotypical Inceptor-Movement Pairings for eVTOL Hover and Forward Flight

Urban Air Mobility is becoming a reality. Joby Aviation, Volocopter, and Supernal are developing and manufacturing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircrafts to fly passengers in metropolitan areas.

Integrating Unmanned Aerial Systems for Enhanced Wildlife Hazard Assessment in Airport Environments

Our team has explored the use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) technologies to develop a concept of operations for data collection during a Wildlife Hazard Assessment.

Using Natural Language Processing to Identify Mental Health Indicators in Aviation Voluntary Safety Reports

Voluntary Safety Reporting Programs (VSRPs) are a critical tool in the aviation industry for monitoring safety issues observed by the frontline workforce.

Aeromedical Transformation: From Clinical to Performance-Based Assessments.

Statement of the Problem or Issue: The traditional approach to aeromedical evaluation primarily focused on clinically based assessments may not comprehensively capture the dynamic demands of modern aviation operations.

Ant Colony Optimization for Cooperative Inspection Path Planning Using Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a new swarm intelligence-based approach to deal with the cooperative path planning problem of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which is essential for the automatic inspection of infrastructure.

A Unified MPC Strategy for a Tilt-rotor VTOL UAV Towards Seamless Mode Transitioning

Capabilities of long-range flight and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) are essential for Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Tiltrotor VTOLs have the advantage of balancing control simplicity and system complexity due to their…

Transient growth of a wake vortex and its initiation via inertial particles

The transient dynamics of a wake vortex, modelled as a strong swirling $q$-vortex, are investigated with a focus on optimal transient growth driven by continuous eigenmodes associated with continuous spectra.

Enhanced bubble growth near an advancing solidification front

Frozen water might appear opaque since gas bubbles can get trapped in the ice during the freezing process. They nucleate and then grow near the advancing solidification front, due to the formation of a gas supersaturatio…

Triangular phase-shift detector for drone precise vertical landing RF systems

This paper presents a circuit for precise vertical landing of drones based on a three phase-shifts detection of a single frequency transmitted from the landing point.

Perturbation analysis of triadic resonance in columnar vortices: selection rules and the roles of external forcing and critical layers

The remarkable robustness of columnar vortices suggests the existence of fundamental constraints that prevent spontaneous disintegration.

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Offloading Cellular Communications with Cooperating UAVs

Effective solutions for intelligent data collection in terrestrial cellular networks are crucial, especially in the context of Internet of Things applications.

The Transition of RGB Imagery Applied to Fog and Low Clouds from NASA Capabilities within the GOES Proving Ground to the Present Era

A wide range of RGB Imagery products are now available from the GOES ABI instrument, but less than a decade earlier, these false-color imagery products were only seen over Europe and Africa within the suite of the EUMETS…

Exploring the intellectual insights in aviation safety research: A systematic literature and bibliometric review

Autonomous Navigation for eVTOL: Review and Future Perspectives

This survey paper explores the emergent domain of electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOLs), emphasizing the critical role of autonomous navigation capabilities essential for their effective integration and…

Community Noise Acceptance of Advanced Air Mobility Aircraft

Volpe acoustic + community-acceptance study of eVTOL aircraft noise signatures during takeoff, hover, and cruise. Establishes the empirical basis for FAA AAM noise certification standards under Part 36.

A Data-Driven Autopilot for Fixed-Wing Aircraft Based on Model Predictive Control

Autopilots for fixed-wing aircraft are typically designed based on linearized aerodynamic models consisting of stability and control derivatives obtained from wind-tunnel testing.

VFR Flight Into Instrument Meteorological Conditions

SKYbrary article on VFR-into-IMC encounters — the 178-second outcome study, decision-making pitfalls, pre-flight weather assessment failures. Cross-references the NTSB SS-23/01 weather-GA accident study.

LEMDA: A Lagrangian-Eulerian Multiscale Data Assimilation Framework

Lagrangian trajectories are widely used as observations for recovering the underlying flow field via Lagrangian data assimilation (DA).

Effect of Tripping and Domain-Width on Transonic Buffet on Periodic NASA-CRM Airfoils

Transonic buffet is an instability characterized by shock-oscillations and separated boundary-layers. High-fidelity simulations have typically been limited to narrow domains to be computationally feasible, overly constra…

Constraint-Aware Mesh Refinement Method by Reachability Set Envelope of Curvature Bounded Paths

This paper presents an enhanced direct-method-based approach for the real-time solution of optimal control problems to handle path constraints, such as obstacles.

Graph Koopman Autoencoder for Predictive Covert Communication Against UAV Surveillance

Low Probability of Detection (LPD) communication aims to obscure the very presence of radio frequency (RF) signals, going beyond just hiding the content of the communication.

Multi-Agent Based Transfer Learning for Data-Driven Air Traffic Applications

Research in developing data-driven models for Air Traffic Management (ATM) has gained a tremendous interest in recent years. However, data-driven models are known to have long training time and require large datasets to …

Experimental investigation and scale analysis on melting of salty ice in a 3D-printed cavity filled with porous media

While significant interests have been devoted to the double diffusive phase change heat transfer of binary solutions, the understanding on the melting heat transfer of salty ice in porous media is still imcomplete.

The Adaptable and Resilient Safety System: The Human Factor in Future In-Time Aviation Safety Management Systems

In-time integrated safety management will be paramount for safely enabling the envisioned transformations of the future National Airspace System (NAS).

An Experimental System for Strategic Flight Path Management in Advanced Air Mobility

In the concept envisioned for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations, fleets of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles would operate between vertiports distributed within a densely populated area.

An Experimental System for Strategic Flight Path Management in Advanced Air Mobility

In the concept envisioned for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations, fleets of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles would operate between vertiports distributed within a densely populated area.

Designing a Flight Test of a Flight Path Management System for Advanced Air Mobility Research

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has completed a flight test to evaluate the performance of an onboard prototype automation system operating in future high density urban airspace.

A Wind-Aware Path Planning Method for UAV-Asisted Bridge Inspection

In response to the gap in considering wind conditions in the bridge inspection using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) , this paper proposes a path planning method for UAVs that takes into account the influence of wind, base…

Learning Hybrid Policies for MPC with Application to Drone Flight in Unknown Dynamic Environments

In recent years, drones have found increased applications in a wide array of real-world tasks. Model predictive control (MPC) has emerged as a practical method for drone flight control, owing to its robustness against mo…

Efficient and Mathematically Robust Operations for Certified Neural Networks Inference

In recent years, machine learning (ML) and neural networks (NNs) have gained widespread use and attention across various domains, particularly in transportation for achieving autonomy, including the emergence of flying t…

Failure Behavior and Control-Based Mitigation for a Parallel Hybrid Propulsion System

NASA is pursuing research to advance Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) technologies that address fuel burn and emission reduction goals. EAP brings the potential for improved performance over the state of the art.

Failure Behavior and Control Based Mitigation for a Parallel Hybrid Propulsion System

NASA is pursuing research to advance Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) technologies that address fuel burn and emission reduction goals. EAP brings the potential for improved performance over the state of the art.

Inflight Icing — SKYbrary Knowledge Base

SKYbrary inflight icing comprehensive review — icing physics, SLD vs rime + clear, certification standards (FAR 25 App. C + App. O), pneumatic boot vs TKS vs heated leading edge anti-ice.

Al6061-RAM2 Development and Hot-Fire Testing using Additive Manufacturing Laser Powder Directed Energy Deposition for Liquid Rocket Engine Channel-Cooled Nozzles

Aluminum 6061-RAM2 is a high-strength aluminum feedstock developed for additive manufacturing (AM)processes. This alloy leverages Reactive Additive Manufacturing (RAM) technology.

Al6061-RAM2 Development and Hot-Fire Testing using Additive Manufacturing Laser Powder Directed Energy Deposition for Liquid Rocket Engine Channel-Cooled Nozzles

Aluminum 6061-RAM2 is a high-strength aluminum feedstock developed for additive manufacturing (AM)processes. This alloy leverages Reactive Additive Manufacturing (RAM) technology.