NEXTOR II

Sea level rise (SLR) will pose the greatest threat to coastal airports in the near future. Finding effective ways to mitigate or adapt to the impact of SLR is a challenge that many engineers and city planners have been addressing for a long time. The purpose of this study is to explore the potential of seaplane bases and seaplanes as future modes of transportation. Although seaplanes were most popular in the early twentieth century and were eventually phased out with new land-based aircraft, they can potentially be of great use in future climate scenarios. In this study, we propose a...

The Autonomous Firefighting Aircraft (AFA) concept is a state-of-the-art, theoretical model that proposes the physical implementation of a fleet of aircraft operating from a network of strategic locations that can autonomously and rapidly respond to growing wildfires in real-time, using the latest drone and satellite technology (FireSat) as support. The study presents a system design approach and methodology for identifying the optimal locations of air attack bases for the complex web of aircraft that can be activated in the event of fire detection within an agency’s responsibility area....

This study introduces a logistic regression-based stress level metric to (1) assess stress levels of Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) and pilots, and (2) detect off-nominal events using audio-derived features. With over 16,264 labeled ATC-pilot utterances and scalar and multi-dimensional speech attributes, it is demonstrated that a developed Stress Score metric can capture meaningful distinctions between the nominal and off-nominal utterances. The Beta distribution fit further captures the skewed nature of Stress Scores, indicating that the model follows a non-linear but quantifiable pattern...

The emergence of the urban air mobility (UAM) concept promises to leverage a new generation of electrical vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to provide three-dimensional and comprehensive transportation services. However, UAM does not provide door-to-door service and often requires other transportation modes to travel from origin to destination. To address this problem, study proposes the Urban Surface and Air Mobility (USaAM) concept that enables door-to-door travel, utilizing the same fly-drive vehicle for both surface and airborne transportation. The proposed USaAM concept...