UC Berke
ley is the home of numerous active groups that work on the future of aviation. These have diverse interest that include the future of air traffic control, the automation of some specific functionalities of flight (especially in the emerging era of the e-VTOL paradigm), electric propulsion and alternate aviation fuels, operations (and in particular the future of mobility with vertiport networks).
Today’s air traffic operations are controlled and managed by humans, with very limited automation capabilities. As a consequence, capacity of these operations is constrained and specific aspects of them (for example the integration of vertical aviation in the urban space) are vastly underexplored. In the future, one of the challenges of air traffic operations will be the need to adapt to the diversity, density, and numbers of aircraft while maintaining safety.
Specific to the field of traffic operations, themes of interest include and are not limited to provably safe automation, safe learning (and applications to aerospace), design of future airspace operations for agility and adaptability and the transformation of National Airspace System (NAS) architectures by digitalization.
In the context of design of mobility systems of the future, themes of interest include the design of regional vertiport networks and their operations, the integration of vertiports in the urban space, equitable access to mobility through regional electric aviation and the automation of e-VTOL operations. In this broad context, the question of social, legal and economic implications of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is an overarching thread pursued by our team.
A workshop called Clean Slate Approach to Crewed and Uncrewed Air Traffic Operations was jointly organized by UC Berkeley, NASA and academic partners on September 12 and 13, 2023 on the UC Berkeley campus, in which these questions were discussed. It will be followed by a workshop in the Spring 2024 at NASA Ames, home of Berkeley Space Center. This workshop will be open to academia, government and the private sector, more details to be posted soon. If you are interested in participating to this workshop, please complete our Berkeley Space Engagement form.