The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has unveiled a strategy for supporting the emerging urban air mobility (UAM) sector in terms of regulatory development and safe testing of new aerial vehicles and operations. Central to this is the Innovation Hub and its three main services, the Gateway, Sandbox and Regulatory laboratories.
Speaking at the Foresight Aerospace urban air mobility (UAM) conference in London on December 5, 2019, Frederic Laugere, innovation services lead at the CAA, said, "If we want to operate at commercial scale at some stage, and with airspace and how to integrate these aircraft with all the other aircraft...really we don't know how [yet]...this is why we created the Innovation Hub, in April 2019, in line with our core principles of safety, security, and consumer protection."
He explained that the Gateway "will make it easier for innovators to work with regulators," while the Sandbox "will enable exploration and testing of innovative concepts in a safe place," and the Regulatory lab will "anticipate and respond to complex emerging regulatory challenges."
The Innovation Hub is exploring a range of themes related to the future of air travel, including UAM aircraft; BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) unmanned aircraft operations; unmanned traffic management (UTM); electronic conspicuity (the visibility of autonomous aircraft to other aircraft); and automated decision making. The CAA has already published white papers on the second and third of these and has one in progress on the fourth that will be published in 2020, said Laugere.
With the Regulatory Lab, the CAA has published some "Guidelines for Innovators" under an approach known as NOSTrA (Novel Operation in a Specific Trial Area). The CAA Innovation Hub is also working with the European Future Flight Challenge program (run by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and the EUROCAE standards-setting body), chairing the safety subgroup (SG3) of its eVTOL working group (WG112). And it is working on the Pathfinder program with the UK Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on the integration of drones, etc, into airspace, under the UTM Open Access Framework.
Laugere said the CAA is working with seven companies under the Sandbox umbrella: Amazon, NESTA, NBEC (a consortium that includes BlueBear, Thales, Cranfield University, and Vodafone), Altitude Angel, NATS, Volocopter, and industrial drone operator Sees.ai. With Volocopter the CAA is part of a EUROCAE group on eVTOL airworthiness standards, aiming to create a regulatory roadmap. Presently, the group is focused on building risk-analysis tools.
Asked whether the CAA and others will have the necessary regulations ready for eVTOL operations starting in 2023, which some manufacturers are planning, Laugere responded, "It's up to us to drive this together and depends how complex the questions are...there are lots of aspects, for example flight operations, and how we can train the pilots."
