“Closing the Loop”
We aim to keep our audience and industry peers informed as we develop new research, highlight partnerships, and deploy new products. “Closing the Loop” is an effort to share our learnings as we uncover them. We host all our previous memos below for reference anytime.
The Next Decade of Air Taxis: Infrastructure Before Aircraft
The vehicles grab the headlines, but the decade ahead will be won or lost on the digital and physical infrastructure around them.
Community Trust Is the Runway for Urban Air Mobility
Our perception research keeps returning to the same point: public acceptance, not technology, will set the pace of urban air mobility.
Modeling Uncertainty: What Airspace Risk and Everyday Probability Have in Common
A guest perspective on why the maths of uncertainty shows up everywhere, from flight planning to the way people weigh everyday odds.
Reading the Sky: How Simulation Shapes Safer Drone Corridors
Before a single corridor opens over a real city, it has already flown hundreds of thousands of times inside our simulation environment.
Where UTM Stands in 2023: From Blueprint to Deployment
Five years on from the Blueprint, the question has shifted from whether UTM will arrive to how quickly it can be deployed at scale.
Airspace Fairness
The future of the commercial drone industry, and the advancement of many new humanitarian and enterprise applications for drone technology, rely upon the safe integration of drones into the airspace.
Solving for Uncertainty: Exploring the Markov Decision Process in Dense Airspace
As humans, when we're faced with a difficult decision, we try to evaluate the most likely outcomes without introducing an internal bias into the process.
Autonomous Conflict Avoidance Systems for the Airspace of the Future
In our last memo, we presented the idea of using mathematical models like the Markov Decision Process (MDP) to enable better decision making when faced with complex and uncertain environments, like the increasingly populated airspace.
Airbus UTM Selected By DroneDeploy To Offer UTM Services
Airbus UTM is pleased to announce DroneDeploy, the leading drone software company, will integrate with Airbus UTM to offer airspace authorization and flight briefings for commercial drone pilots.
An Update on Airbus and the Global UTM Association (GUTMA)
At this year's GUTMA Connected Skies Conference, Airbus joined the organization and a member of the Airbus UTM team, Jessie Mooberry, was elected to the board of directors.
Encounter Aware Flight Planning in the Unmanned Airspace
To our knowledge, this is the first ever quantitative analysis of flight planning in the context of centralized and federated UTM architectures.
Centralization v Federation
In preparation for the release of our technical paper, Encounter Aware Flight Planning in the Unmanned Airspace, we use this memo to provide an overview of centralized and federated architectural approaches.
Preliminary Community Perception Study
We've found when reading literature or attending events, that there is a shocking lack of input from the general public when it comes to discussions around the deployment of Urban Air Mobility (UAM).
UTM Transition
We distributed this memo to announce we're moving from A3 to Airbus Urban Mobility and welcoming Dr. Isabel del Pozo de Poza as the new leader of the Airbus UTM team.
How Does Risk Influence Airspace Capacity?
To ensure that our Open Risk Framework can effectively anticipate and respond to changes in capacity, we're conducting a range of studies in our UTM prototype simulator.
Safeguarding our Future Skies - The Video
In this memo we debut our video on how Airbus UTM will ensure the future safety of our skies.
Post Blueprint: What's Next for Altiscope
In this memo we announce Airbus was approved by the FAA to provide Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) Services as an approved UAS Service Supplier (USS).
The Role of Risk Assessment in UTM
Successful safety risk management for autonomous vehicles in our airspace will require that we extend and evolve our current frameworks, many of which are qualitative and subjective.
How Do We Calculate Risk?
Our second risk briefing focuses on how we developed our flexible open risk framework.
What are the Biggest Factors that Contribute to Risk?
From the sensitivity analysis of our fault trees for a UAV crash or collision, we learned that four broad categories of factors have a strong influence on the probability of a loss of control that results in a crash.
Airbus UTM Blueprint Launch
Airbus' UTM Blueprint is Altiscope's contribution to moving aviation forward. This document lays out the information and the specifications needed to implement an action plan.
Architecture of a UTM
The memo debut of our design for a modular and scalable UTM service stack.
How Many Drones Will a UTM Need to Support?
In this memo, we're sharing a sneak preview of The Blueprint's projections in the context of last week's memo highlighting the need for an air traffic management architecture built to be scalable and flexible.
Different Countries, Similar Approaches - Harmonized Systems
Governments and industry professionals around the world recognize the need for infrastructure change in order to support the vehicle innovations of the future.
Volume Estimation Tool
We built a tool to streamline the calculations for estimating the volume of drones coming to our skies and shared it with all our subscribers along with instructions for different ways the tool can be used.
Principles of a UTM
The diversity of emerging aircraft demands a new approach to air traffic management in order to deliver the time savings and reduced headache they're heralding.
When Drones Fly at Different Speeds and Altitudes
In this study we tested the effect of airspace configuration on safety, specifically on what happens when varying both speed and altitude.
Airspace Bands by Heading
We set up this study to measure the effect on collision rates when autonomous vehicles are assigned altitude based on their direction of flight - easterly moving aircraft at one altitude, westerly moving aircraft at a second altitude.
Metrics for Near-Miss Events
There is no publicly available global metric for comparing air traffic safety events in which two aircraft get close enough to one another that a collision was barely avoided.
How Many Drones until Big Sky isn't Big Enough? Part II
Once again using our simulation tool we explored traffic over major cities and found that, for a city like Paris, at a rate of 1,000 short urban mobility flights per hour, a collision will occur about 800 times per million flight hours.
How Many Drones until Big Sky isn't Big Enough? Part I
Using our proprietary air traffic simulation tool, we began to model what the airspace would look like with varying traffic types, traffic densities, rules of the road, and conflict avoidance methods.
Closing the Loop
In order for us to realize our mission of accelerating the safe adoption of new aircraft into the airspace, our team is working with decision makers all around the world.