Thank you to Dr. Vishwanath Bulusu, Aerospace Research Scientist, Crown Consulting Inc., NASA Ames, who presented How Open are Our Skies? Re-exploring the Airspace for Revitalizing Air Mobility at the Transportation Seminar Oct. 20, 2023.
Abstract: Even though 60% of America lives within 10 miles of a regional airport, 20th century aviation accounts for less than 0.2% regional trips under 300 miles. By leveraging these underutilized airports, urban and regional air mobility can connect lower-income counties to jobs and services concentrated in higher-income areas, by air. How open and accessible is our airspace to support this influx? The seminar will present three research approaches to characterizing both uncontrolled and controlled airspace for the new entrants. First, we will explore a geometric approach to quantify the available airspace as a function of performance capabilities. Then we will discuss how to evaluate URAM corridors within an airspace. Finally, we will explore recent novel work on quantifying the behavior of Visual Flight Rules (VFR) traffic which has a significant presence in uncontrolled airspace that these novel entrants are expected to share.
Bio: Dr. Vishwanath Bulusu is an Aerospace Research Scientist with Crown Consulting Inc. working in Flight Dynamics, Trajectory and Control branch at the NASA Ames Research Center. He received a Systems Engineering doctoral degree from UC, Berkeley writing one of the world’s first dissertations in the field of Urban Air Mobility. His research is deeply focused in the area of Urban Air Transportation. He has extensive experience in air transportation systems design, air traffic simulation, detect and avoid and collision avoidance systems, and airspace analysis and risk assessment. He is currently working on new airspace operational architectures, procedures and technologies to enable autonomous cargo movement across regions. Vishwa is also a maker, educator and explorer at heart. He has extensive teaching experience having taught classes at Berkeley, Stanford and also to high school and middle school students, which he continues whenever possible. He also engages with the community through his service as the Head of Production at KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM.