Overview of the Small Aircraft Transportation System Project Four Enabling Operating Capabilities

Abstract

It has become evident that our commercial air transportation system is reaching its peak in terms of capacity, with numerous delays in the system and the demand still steadily increasing. NASA, FAA, and the National Consortium for Aviation Mobility (NCAM) have partnered to aid in increasing the mobility throughout the United States through the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) project. The SATS project has been a five-year effort to provide the technical and economic basis for further national investment and policy decisions to support a small aircraft transportation system. The SATS vision is to enable people and goods to have the convenience of on-demand point-to-point travel, anywhere, anytime for both personal and business travel. This vision can be obtained by expanding near all-weather access to more than 3,400 small community airports that are currently under-utilized throughout the United States. SATS has focused its efforts on four key operating capabilities that have addressed new emerging technologies, procedures, and concepts to pave the way for small aircraft to operate in nearly all weather conditions at virtually any runway in the United States. These four key operating capabilities are: , by showcasing the accomplishments achieved throughout the project and demonstrating that a small aircraft transportation system could be viable. The technologies, procedures, and concepts were successfully demonstrated to show that they were safe, effective, and affordable for small aircraft in near all weather conditions. The focus of this paper is to provide an overview of the technical and operational feasibility of the four operating capabilities, and explain how they can enable a small aircraft transportation system.

Initial sizing of a roadable personal air vehicle using design of experiments for various engine types

“…NASA has recognized that personal air travel using an on-demand, highly distributed air transportation system would allow for improved mobility in congested areas in the USA. Therefore, they began research on this topic through the Small Aircraft Transportation System initiative (Viken et al , 2006), focusing on airspace-related issues considering the operation of PAVs. NASA has been investigating specific vehicle technologies in the PAV sector (Moore, 2006) under the Vehicle Systems Program (Vito et al , 2012).…”

RPAS Automatic ADS-B based Separation Assurance and Collision Avoidance System Real Time Simulation Results

“…After that, RPAS have started to be considered also in the civilian aviation framework, with the aim of achieving similar advantages in civil applications in terms of costs reduction and substitution of human pilots in performing repetitive tasks and long endurance operations that can be efficiently delegated to automation in the aircraft guidance. In addition, parallel development of concepts such as the ones of Small Air Transport (SAT) [2] and Personal Air Transport System (PATS) [3] is also linked to RPAS concepts and technologies.…”

Feasibility Study of Short Takeoff and Landing Urban Air Mobility Vehicles using Geometric Programming

“…The ultimate goal is to determine whether a STOL aircraft, with some useful operational capability, can be made to land on a runway short enough to place in an urban environment. As part of this work, previous literature concerning small aircraft transportation system design [6], [7], thin-haul transportation vehicles [8], [9], [10], VTOL aircraft [11], and STOL aircraft is considered [12], [13].…”