AIAA report urges action by Congress to welcome electric air taxis
By Paul Brinkmann|January 31, 2025
Suggestions offered about certification, weather tech, autonomy and air traffic control
Achieving widespread, affordable transportation aboard the coming line of electric air taxis in the United States will require Congress and the White House to direct the FAA, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Institute to adopt a “future-proofed” approach to safety, according to a report from the Certification Task Force of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
The report, “Challenges to the Commercialization of Advanced Air Mobility,” published Jan. 15, says that electrified aircraft are poised to start a “global revolution in air travel” but “regulatory and legal hurdles remain,” and it proposes solutions to get past those hurdles.
By “future-proofed,” the authors mean laws and regulations should apply to any emerging technology and not be limited to existing or legacy techniques. The report also says that NTSB and some state aviation agencies may need to enhance training and expertise of their personnel regarding vertical-lift flight to keep up with emerging electric aircraft types, many of which are capable of vertical takeoff and landing.
Here are key points raised in the report, along with insights and explanations from my interviews with three of the authors:
Future-proofing laws and regulations to be performance-based
“Laws that focus too heavily on the current state of the art may be rendered ineffective by technology developments,” the authors state in the introduction.
One of the authors, James Grimsley, executive director of the Advanced Technology Initiatives program for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, told me that the speed of innovation and novel aircraft development has outpaced previous timelines traditionally used to develop regulations.
“We have to change the mindset on how we create laws and statutes in general,” Grimsley said. “Instead of certifying a system, you want to be able to say, ‘This is the performance we want, or the outcome.’”
Otherwise, he said, “it’s like passing a law against killing someone with a rock, rather than a law against killing in general with any method.”
Grimsley noted that the industry employs artificial intelligence to develop software and hardware that is certified for aviation, which has sped up the pace of such development, although FAA still doesn’t allow autopilot software during flight to learn and adapt itself as it flies. That’s because in such cases, the functions would become different than what was certified by FAA.
Expansion of aviation weather prediction at low altitudes
When it comes to weather, U.S. aviation is still following FAA regulations written some 50 years ago, according to the report: “The airspace below 3,000 feet AGL [above ground level] has become a weather desert with little to no coverage.”
To bridge these gaps in weather status and forecasting, the report says, policies “need to be updated to better reflect and account for advancements in science and technology.”
Such outdated regulations “do not take into account the advancements in aviation weather observation technologies and improvements in sensor technology” and the number of stations and amount of data that pilots can access is unnecessarily restricted.
The report notes that a large amount of aviation weather information comes from airport-based installations — the Automated Weather Observing Systems and Automated Surface Observation Systems. But thousands of additional government-run sites could be added to aviation’s weather toolkit, such as those maintained by the National Interagency Fire Center and by state departments of transportation, the report says.
Currently, airlines are permitted to access supplementary sites for weather data to cancel a flight due to weather concerns, but not to approve a flight, aviation consultant Rex Alexander, another author, told me. If additional weather stations were approved for use by commercial airlines, up to 30% of canceled flights might be avoided due to the elimination of gaps in weather forecasts, he said.
Future of air traffic management
The report urges AIAA to facilitate a working group of FAA, NASA and emerging aircraft manufacturers to “discuss and create the requirements for” the future of the nation’s air traffic management system.
“We recognize that today’s concepts of partitioned airspace, with permanent allocations and restrictions, may not be applicable in the future,” the report says.
The task force “believes that a future adoption of a networked air traffic system” — in which each aircraft would provide position, identification and its intended flight path — could “serve as a see-and-avoid system, without burdening each vehicle with an electro-optical detection system” that could stifle growth by driving up costs per vehicle, according to the report.
Training unique to vertical lift aircraft infrastructure
“FAA will need to hire more technicians who have vertical flight and powered lift experience as well as increase training and education for these individuals that includes vertical flight infrastructure regulations, standards, and safety,” the report says.
Some of this increased training regarding vertical flight infrastructure may also occur through expanding the heliport safety course offered by the Transportation Safety Institute — a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation that provides training programs to transportation professionals — to include vertiport safety, the report says.
“Given the number of eVTOL [electric vertical takeoff and landing] infrastructure sites expected to be built over the next 10-15 years, it will be necessary to increase the annual offerings provided by the TSI to include more FAA staff members, state aviation officials, and municipality planners,” the report says, and it urges “permanent allocation of federal funding to accomplish this.”