Jane Edwards
NASA and The Longbow Group will develop flight test corridors for unmanned aerial systems in Hampton Roads, Virginia, under a Space Act Agreement.
Longbow will work with NASA’s Langley Research Center to develop and assess a concept of operations for beyond visual line-of-sight flight corridors for advanced air mobility UAS in support of BVLOS operations between the company’s unmanned systems research and technology center at Fort Monroe in Virginia and Langley’s City Environment Range Testing for Autonomous Integrated Navigation range, NASA said Tuesday.
The AAM High Density Vertiplex project seeks to assess and prototype an urban air mobility ecosystem and conduct safety risk assessments, testing and collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration to facilitate BVLOS flights at NASA Langley.
“When implemented, these efforts will enable the UAM ecosystem prototype assessment with longer, more complex flight routes, within the HDV subproject for AAM along with establishing operational credit for an array of advanced NASA technologies,” said Lou Glaab, HDV sub-project lead.”
Marco Sterk, president and CEO of Longbow, said the company is excited to work with NASA Langley, Raytheon Technologies, Hampton University and the city of Hampton on the project.
“One major benefit will be collaborating with Raytheon and Hampton University (HU) to include radar inputs from their Skyler radar,” said Glaab. “This system will be mounted on a HU building in downtown Hampton and is designed to help enable ground-based sense and avoid, and will complement and extend our radar systems we are currently installing at NASA LaRC.”
NASA said other potential collaborative research areas of the agreement are UAS traffic management, data, command and control communications, meteorological systems, data networks, surveillance radars and supplemental data service providers.
