NASA’s ARMD conducts innovative research that leads to revolutionary concepts, technologies, and capabilities that enable radical change to both the airspace system and the aircraft that fly within it. Through task orders issued under this blanket purchase agreement, Crown provided subject matter expertise, research and analysis, and strategic planning support to ARMD. This representative sampling of tasks conveys an understanding of Crown’s work:
- Developed operational concepts for cargo-carrying UASs and highly automated or autonomous passenger flight vehicles
- Determined priorities and concerns for passenger acceptance of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft
- Assessed the readiness level of technologies across the UAM ecosystem
- Adjudicated and dispositioned public comments received on NASA’s UAM vision ConOps
- Synthesized lessons learned from ATD sub-projects
- Led an effort for the Extensible Traffic Management (xTM) sub-project to gather industry feedback from new entrants (e.g., UAS, UAM, supersonic aircraft, balloons, and airships) on the coordination and data exchanged between new airspace users and traditional ATM
- Produced the Sky for All community co-developed strategic vision and web portal, mapping out requirements for a highly automated and integrated 2045 airspace system
- Created an interactive tool for visualization of research progress by using Tableau to depict relationships between Programs, Projects, Technical Challenges, Critical Commitments, and additional data
Generated an AAM weather roadmap to document a path to enabling weather systems that could support mature-state AAM operations
Applied systems engineering to organize and coordinate ARMD’s cross-project research and development (R&D) for the AAM Mission Integration Office (AMIO)
Benefit to NASA: The Airspace Operations and Safety Program (AOSP) was the primary user of this NASA ARMD BPA contract. Within the program, customers included its constituent projects/sub-projects, including ATM-X, ATD, xTM, and UAM. For example, we executed a task for the ATM-X project in which we produced a gap analysis to inform planning for future ATM paradigms beyond the year 2045. In that timeframe, the air transportation system is expected to include UAS, air taxis (UAM), hypersonic/supersonic aircraft, high altitude long endurance (HALE) aircraft, autonomous cargo and passenger aircraft, space launch vehicles, and high-density air traffic operations of current vehicles. Crown’s analysis included a survey of the state of the art for current and next-generation ATM services geared towards current and near-term air traffic operations, the identification of novel operations, vehicle types, services, and projected traffic densities relevant to 2,045+ ATM operations, and an assessment of whether near-term solutions are sufficient to enable the future paradigms. NASA used the results of our gap analysis to focus its R&D portfolio investments on issues that will enable all vehicle/mission access to the airspace. Our gap analysis was a key input in NASA’s development of its Sky for All initiative, which we subsequently also supported.
An example of Crown’s application of innovative approaches is in our support of ARMD’s AMIO. Since this office’s inception, Crown has helped carry out its charter to coordinate the efforts of the numerous ARMD projects and sub-projects conducting AAM-related R&D. The specific innovation is our application of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to formally connect, integrate, and maintain technical relationships in a structured, traceable, and transparent manner. We have provided training on MBSE to dozens of NASA and external stakeholder personnel, constructed and maintained the constituent data and functional models, and produced a comprehensive dictionary of over 300 AAM terms to promote consistency and rigor in terminology.
Client
- NASA