Aviation Week Network reports that Wisk Aero “believes there is a path to operate its uncrewed air taxis on commercial services without the need for new FAA rulemakings, by relying instead on a mix of existing regulations, letters of agreement with air traffic control (ATC), waivers, exemptions and other special procedures.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)
Tag: Autonomy
2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum: AAM And Autonomy
By AUVSI News
Written 17 April 2023
Originally published by AUVSI
In June, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) will host their annual AIAA AVIATION Forum. AIAA is the world’s largest aerospace professional society, and the 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum is the only event that covers the entire integrated spectrum of aviation business, research, development, and technology.
AUVSI met with Jeremy Wang, an AAM expert, to learn more about the event’s programming around autonomy. Wang is the co-founder and COO of Ribbit, a venture-backed startup developing autonomous aircraft with the goal of improving e-commerce supply chains. Ribbit is credited with the first fully automated gate-to-gate flight in Canada and will soon be bringing commercial routes online in collaboration with regulators, communities, and customers.
Leaps Toward a New Age of Aviation
Wang explained that 2023 is a critical year to convene for discussions on AAM, noting: “What’s exciting right now is that we’re seeing proof that the technology to support eVTOL and autonomous flights is operationally ready…. We’re at a point where technologies have been initially validated, and now the question is how we integrate this into civilian airspace.”
Wang identified outdated regulations as a key challenge for reaching operationalization of AAM. As he explained, there is agreement that the starting point is flight with experimental permits and testing and the desired endpoint is a clear basis for certification processes – but the path in between is uncertain and challenging. In the early stages, some companies are focusing on autonomy for operations without passengers, such as cargo, aerial surveillance, and other missions in rural areas.
Regarding regulatory frameworks and U.S. aviation leadership, Wang said: “Entrepreneurs will go wherever opportunities take them. In fact, companies are looking to achieve airworthiness approvals in other regions and convert them over to the United States, which indicates there is a lack of good frameworks here.” He suggested that the industry work together to support the expansion of existing bilateral frameworks that can be converted to the United States to avoid duplicative regulatory work.
Wang has reason to be optimistic, adding: “One thing that’s exciting is the talk around Digital Flight Rules (DFR) being championed by NASA.” These rules recognize there are new technologies available for collision avoidance. NASA is soliciting feedback from the aviation industry, including from airports, ATC, and operators.
As he considers where autonomy is headed, Wang praised the industry collaboration taking place via standards communities, including RTCA and ASTM.
He also shared his hope that the small UAS and AAM communities will identify areas for increased collaboration, saying: “There can be a lot of benefit for both sides to take from each other on new standards and operational risk frameworks.”
Learn More at the 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum
Given recent advancements in autonomous technology and commercial aviation, Wang anticipates that the 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum, 12–16 June, will be well-timed to provide informed perspectives on where AAM is going in the next 10–20 years.
The event will cover key topics on aviation and aeronautics, with Daily Forum Themes:
- Monday, 12 June: State of the Industry
- Tuesday, 13 June: Decarbonization & Sustainability
- Wednesday, 14 June: Advanced Air Mobility
- Thursday, 15 June: Aircraft Certification
- Friday, 16 June: Hypersonics & Supersonics
Why should AUVSI members attend?
- Over 1,700 technical presentations on the latest innovations spanning 20+ aviation and aeronautics research topics will be delivered.
- Speakers and panelists participating in the sessions are proven business leaders and innovators with their fingers on the pulse of the aviation industry.
- Over 2,000 participants from across the globe are expected, representing hundreds of government, academic, and private institutions.
Register Now for the event in San Diego (and available online).
About Jeremy Wang
Jeremy Wang is the co-founder and COO of Ribbit, a venture-backed startup developing autonomous aircraft with the goal of improving e-commerce supply chains. Ribbit is credited with the first fully automated gate-to-gate flight in Canada and will soon be bringing commercial routes online in collaboration with regulators, communities, and customers. Prior to Ribbit, Jeremy was the CTO of Canada’s top-ranked commercial drone operator where he oversaw the development of special-purpose drones for industrial and defense applications. Jeremy completed a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and PhD in Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Waterloo.
Transitioning AAM Into Reality at AIAA AVIATION Forum
By AUVSI News
Originally published by AUVSI
The 2024 AIAA AVIATION Forum will be held 29 July–2 August in Las Vegas, and this year’s event aims to bridge the gap between visionary concepts and tangible technological reality.
Starr Ginn, Advanced Concepts and Partnerships at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, served on the forum’s Guiding Coalition. AUVSI met with Ms. Ginn to learn more about NASA’s participation at AIAA AVIATION Forum and the Agency’s vision for how Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) will transform aviation’s role in the everyday movement of people and goods.
Ginn’s Background and AAM Expertise
Ms. Ginn has 27 years of experience conducting one-of-a-kind flight tests. Since 2011, she has played a critical role at NASA Armstrong to develop a roadmap for the AAM ecosystem. In her current role, she builds long-term strategies for complex system integration in partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense and industry.
She recently led the planning, development, and execution of the Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign (AAM NC) series, which consists of flight testing an experimental AAM ecosystem of novel eVTOL and cargo vehicles, infrastructure, and airspace management technologies in the context of increasingly complex safety scenarios enabled by automation.
In parallel to her work on electric propulsion and energy storage, she has also pushed research and certifiable automation software architectures to increase the safety of crewed and uncrewed aircraft.
In addition, she is a proponent for encouraging young women to get into aviation and mechanical engineering careers. As she works with university students and interns at NASA, she says, “It’s exciting to see when they learn about this new area of opportunity” with AAM careers.
Big-Picture View for the AAM Ecosystem
NASA has been working continually on UAM Research Roadmaps assessing where industry is and making sure NASA is providing research to assist them in the near term, mid-term, and long term.
The Agency’s objective is to safely support operations at scale in the National Airspace System (NAS). Ms. Ginn explains her vision of tens of thousands of air taxis and cargo aircraft operations in existing airports and new locations that are closer to urban areas. Reaching this vision will require a lot of new certifiable automation, new airspace tools and routes, and increased digital communications that integrate into the very safe airspace system the U.S. has today.
In the nearer term, Ms. Ginn sees NASA being able to help in a variety of areas, including:
- Piloted eVTOL operations and safety systems
- Studying human-machine interaction
- Making operations more efficient at current airports
- Supporting portable charging infrastructure to support electric flight before large-scale charging infrastructure investments are possible
- Determining efficient routes and how we can decrease an IFR approach area
In the longer term, Ms. Ginn says NASA is conducting research on automation. More research on 1:N operations and how they will push the envelope of NASA’s vision for UAM. She described how industry is doing a “crawl, walk, run approach” to certification, starting with piloted cargo operations with 2 pilots. Eventually, as the industry transitions to increasing levels of autonomy, there will be opportunities to increase efficiency – but there will also be challenges to prove safety and compliance via detect-and-avoid and flight path management.
AAM Certification, Automation, and Software Considerations
Considering what’s ahead for software and automation, Ms. Ginn says, “I would really like to look at how multiple algorithms being operated at same time, and how automation software can determine which of those algorithms is eminent or most important to safely avoid a hazard.” Software for ground collision avoidance, air collision avoidance, geofencing, and object avoidance like towers are all using different kinds of algorithms relying on different sensors. Ms. Ginn is interested in how software architecture determines which algorithm is needed to protect the vehicle at any given moment and how the system switches between different inputs and algorithms prioritization.
Ms. Ginn emphasizes that autonomy software must verifiable, deterministic, and predictable to be safe enough to fly in the NAS. This will be a challenging and complex state of operations for both NASA and industry to achieve.
This year’s AIAA AVIATION Forum will host discussions on how AI can help keep pilots or aircraft safe – beyond just those on the vehicle. The session will explore ways that AI is being used across the entire aviation ecosystem, from ATC to pilot training, as well as the software concepts behind these types of AI.
Register now for AIAA AVIATION Forum
2024 AIAA AVIATION Forum will feature participation from every NASA site, with representatives sharing AAM research on different use cases, from regional cargo operations to urban air mobility operations, to different types of aircraft configurations and control systems. In addition to AAM, NASA experts will also discuss hypersonics, supersonics, and sustainability.
Register for the event here and save before the Early Bird deadline on June 10th.
Satellites to Grant Autonomy to UAVs
Space News reported that satellite communications are key to allowing UAVs to fly autonomously beyond visual line of sight. QuadSAT CEO Joakim Espeland said, “This has to come from space because you need something that has coverage everywhere, no matter what.” US startup Rammaxx “recently tested a proof of concept where a small group of drones successfully lifted a small-scale rocket to a certain height before detaching from it, enabling the launch vehicle to continue its journey.” Rammaxx is currently looking to secure $1 million in funding to test a larger-scale proof of concept.
Full Story (Space News)
Humans, Robots and Infrastructure: Happy Together
Speaker: David Mindell, founder and CEO, Humatics Corp., and professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
by Duane Hyland, AIAA Communications (2008-2017)
As autonomous systems become more numerous, humanity will have to find ways to integrate them, but according to David Mindell, founder and CEO of Massachusetts-based Humatics Corp. and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that won’t be as difficult as it sounds.
Mindell told the audience of the “Beyond the Robots: Toward Situation Autonomy” session at the 2017 AIAA AVIATION Forum in Denver on June 7 that the intersection of digitized machines working with humans goes back to the Apollo era.
Computerized, semi-autonomous systems made the lunar landing possible, Mindell said, pointing out there were some changes to original designs. Originally, he said, the first user interface on Apollo “would have two buttons, one saying ‘go to the moon’ and the other saying ‘take me home.’” As things turned out, it was a bit more complex. The Apollo capsule was full of digital equipment, making the lander what Mindell called “the first digital fly-by-wire system and the grandfather of today’s everyday fly-by-wire systems.”
Researchers have been continuously developing autonomous systems, but Mindell said “systems in extreme environments — air, sea, space — become valuable when they are situated within human systems of operations and use.” He said the value of autonomous systems only truly comes about “when they do something for people, whether it’s package delivery or delivering medical supplies. It’s the place where there’s a relationship with a human individuals or a system of humans.”
However, Mindell said, humans are as valuable to machines as they are to us because we give them purpose as they benefit us.
“People, robots and infrastructure: We have to think about the relationship between these three things and how we engineer the relationships between the three,” he said, explaining that by thinking about the relationships, our ideas of autonomy will continue to evolve and bring about more complex relationships.
Amazon fulfillment centers — where robots work closely with humans — are a good indicator of what our cities will look like over the next 10 years, Mindell said. He added that Humatics is working to make human-robotic interactions safer by measuring range of motion, which will soon be able to “measure location down to a millimeter, down from the 30 centimeters that most systems today can achieve.”
Humans will always need to think about humanity’s relationship with robots, Mindell said.
“I worry a lot about being killed by a poorly designed robot than an evil robot, and that problem worries all of you a great deal, worries me a great deal,” he said. “We must be very cognizant of how we build our human intentions, biases and inputs into the most intelligent systems, and we are learning about data bias and how it’s collected and it’s so dependent on data, etc. And I think of all of these autonomous systems as extensions of human systems. I worry more about the relationships of people getting built in than I do about robots taking over the world.”
RAeS Article: Taking Revolutionary Leaps Toward a New Age of Aviation
By Ming Chang, AIAA Aeronautics Domain Lead* and Senior Director of Flight Technologies, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc (Retired).
Written 17 April 2023
Originally published by Royal Aeronautical Society
The first age of aviation proved that human flight was possible and developed aviation into a safe and viable transportation industry. The second age of aviation started with the development of the jet engine, which enabled higher speeds, improved safety, and paved the way for air travel accessibility for all. The next age of aviation will separate power from propulsion in conjunction with specialised materials and modern avionics and software to enable unique mission-specific aircraft, enhance people’s connectivity, and fully elevate human activity while reducing its environmental footprint.
The widespread use of UAVs and drones –both commercial and recreational – has led the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to adapt its certification processes. Similarly, the FAA must facilitate the safe use of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems for local passenger and cargo transport. As the FAA refreshes its certification strategy, we expect to see clear specifications, regulations, and standards emerge that will strike an appropriate balance between safety and innovation.
Incremental advances in aerodynamics, lightweight structures and materials, manufacturing processes, and air traffic efficiencies will provide only part of the solutions to power aircraft in this next age of aviation. For significant carbon reductions, more efficient aircraft engines and new fuels are needed. The industry will have to shift to more sustainable sources of energy, from sustainable fuels to various forms of electric propulsion to hydrogen.
The transition from oil to new energy sources presents challenges for every facet of aviation systems. The R&D infrastructure in the aeronautics community is ready to meet these challenges through development of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), hydrogen fuel cells (HFC), hydrogen turbine propulsion (HTP), battery-electric vehicles (BEV), and innovations yet to be discovered. Past R&D investments ensure that battery-electric vehicles deliver improved performance by a few percent annually. HFC systems are likely to be cost competitive with internal combustion in as little as five years. ‘Green’ hydrogen production costs are expected to decline to levels competitive with fossil derived sources. Meanwhile, SAF is available today but needs support for greater production and wider adoption. What will it take? If the community focuses and invests in these products and systems, aeronautics can play a leading role in decarbonisation.
AIAA believes we can achieve decarbonisation in aeronautics by 2050. We see several steps needed:
- More government support for the goal of carbon-free aviation by 2050
- Deploying SAF for current airline fleets, while also addressing fleet recapitalization
- Adopting hydrogen fuel cells and other clean, renewable energy sources
- Focusing on new R&D
- Developing the ‘green’ aviation workforce
- Promoting alternate fuel infrastructure development – SAF and hydrogen hubs – to reduce refinery or transportation costs and increase supply availability
Autonomy is certainly going to be part of this next age of aviation and America’s transportation future. With clear operational guidelines, regulations, and standards for accommodating and incorporating autonomy, we see a thriving integrated urban and regional airspace in the next decade. The benefits of autonomy will enhance safety for everyone and enable capabilities we are only just imagining.
In 10 years, we will see many new aeronautics capabilities introduced, and the next generation will experience flight in ways we are just imagining. AIAA is excited about advancing these opportunities as we shape the new age of aviation.
To join the conversation and learn more, attend the 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum, 12–16 June 2023, in San Diego. Visit: aiaa.org/aviation for more information.
About the Author
As AIAA’s Aeronautics Domain lead, Ming Chang ensures that the US aeronautics community focuses on integrating ground and air vehicles in new ways, building on the industry advances made since the early 20th century taking us further and faster, possibly commercialising supersonic and hypersonic flight. He is supporting the community’s emphasis on addressing carbon emissions and sustainability with advanced materials and clean energy sources.
From Vision Through Velocity … Transitioning Technology into Reality
By Russell Boyce, AIAA Aeronautics Domain Lead
Originally published by Royal Aeronautical Society
In the pursuit of a sustainable and high-tech future, researchers, engineers, and pioneers are driving innovation in aviation. 2024 will be a landmark year with the first certification of electric VTOL aircraft, flight testing of new supersonic vehicles, expanded use of automated or autonomous systems, and continued progress of military programs. As aviation accelerates, innovators are bridging the gap between visionary concepts and tangible technological reality every day.
However … the world is facing rapidly evolving generational-scale challenges – societal, economic, environmental, security – alongside those rapidly evolving technical capabilities. How do we achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 while simultaneously advancing multimodal mobility solutions that take the world forward? What could a disruptive “AI-in-the-DNA” future look like for the world, and for the mobility solutions we will trust? What does the future highly skilled workforce look like, how will they be different from today, and how will they have been educated and trained?
The aerospace sector cannot and does not exist in isolation from such challenges, nor from the broad landscape – or ecosystem – of policy, technology, investment, business, government, and end-user stakeholders grappling with them. Our community is brilliant at technology, but that’s not enough. It is critical that we embrace system-of-systems thinking, building understanding and collaboration across the ecosystem of stakeholders, so that the technological innovations we have no difficulty in creating are financeable, certifiable, publicly acceptable, and driven by and tuned for the challenges.
Over the coming decade, we will see many new aeronautics capabilities introduced. The next generation will experience flight in ways we are just imagining. AIAA is excited about advancing these opportunities as we move from vision through velocity, transitioning technology into reality. AIAA is even more excited about the ways that will unfold as partnerships with non-aerospace stakeholders to address global needs.
To join this timely conversation, plan to attend the 2024 AIAA AVIATION Forum, 29 July–2 August 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Thought leaders from across the ecosystem will share, discuss, and debate the opportunities and challenges. New advances in aviation will be unveiled across a vast technical program. The conversation will flow from the big picture view from 50,000 feet, through developments poised to shift the transportation paradigm, to addressing global challenges, embracing transformational technologies both from within and from without (there’s blue sky over the horizon), and finally asking “where to from here?”
We cannot predict the entire future of aviation, but the AIAA community is set to lead its shaping. Visit aiaa.org/aviation for more information.
To join the conversation and learn more, attend the 2024 AIAA AVIATION Forum, 29 July–2 August, in Las Vegas. Visit: aiaa.org/aviation for more information.
About the Author
Russell Boyce, an AIAA Fellow, has spent 35 years building and leading teams in the development of hypersonic technologies and intelligent space systems. His roles have included DSTO Chair for Hypersonics at University of Queensland, and Chair for Intelligent Space Systems and Director of UNSW Canberra Space at University of New South Wales. The latter included spinning off multiple space companies, and playing a lead role in the establishment of the Australian Space Agency. Boyce is also a regular facilitator for senior executive strategic thinking with the global top 5 business school INSEAD, co-publishes the monthly podcast “Leadership in a Disruptive World,” and is passionate about combining disruptive, out-of-the-box thinking with the development of current and future leaders. As AIAA’s Aeronautics Domain Lead, Boyce is working with his Space and Aerospace R&D Domain counterparts to bring about the system-of-systems thinking and actions needed for the future of aerospace.
The ‘Golden Age’ of AI and Autonomy
Panel Highlights Critical Role of AI and Autonomy on Earth and in Space
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla. – In the future artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems will transform how people and assets are tracked, whether on Earth or in space, noted speakers on an AIAA SciTech Forum plenary on AI and Autonomy last Thursday, 9 January.
Advances in real-time monitoring and connectivity will help first responders act fast, said one panelist, recalling a 2012 Sausalito, California, road fatality caused when a man crashed his car following a heart attack. He was traveling alone at night, with no one aware of his location.
“In a world where we have a fully connected comms system, that plays out very differently,” said Eric Smith, senior principal, Remote Sensing and Data Analytics at Lockheed Martin Space.
Redefining Accident Response
Not only would AI wearable tech proactively monitor the man’s medical condition, it also would alert EMS and even coordinate traffic control systems to ensure the speediest response to his location.
The plenary session highlighted advancements in AI and their applications in simulation, safety, and decision making, as well as how autonomous systems are reshaping the future of space exploration.
“This is a golden age for robotics and autonomy,” noted Marco Pavone, lead autonomous vehicle researcher at Nvidia and an associate professor at Stanford University in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
His focus is fourfold: 1) develop visual language models for vehicle autonomy architectures, 2) find other ways of architecting autonomous tasks, 3) explore simulation technologies to enable end-to-end simulation of autonomous tasks in a realistic and controllable way, and 4) research AI safety – building safe and trustworthy AI systems, particularly in space systems and self-driving cars.
Pavone also co-founded a new center at Stanford – the Center for AEroSpace Autonomy Research (CAESAR), which was formed to advance the state of the art by infusing autonomous reasoning capabilities in aerospace systems.
“At the center we are looking at AI techniques for constructions tasks for other space systems and we’re even developing space foundation models that take into account specific inputs and outputs,” he said.
Lockheed Martin is using AI in all four domains of its business – Space, Missiles and Fire Control, Rotary Systems, and Aeronautics. The company envisions AI for autonomy in unstructured environments like the surface of the moon or Mars, with multiagent cooperative autonomy for manufacturing and assembly.
Smart Robots Likely to Precede Humans to Mars
“I foresee the first habitable, critical infrastructure on the surface of Mars being constructed by a team of robots using material and tools and high-level instructions that say, ‘Do the following things’ [in preparation] for humans to arrive,” said Smith.
On the ground, autonomy and AI advances will play an important role in land-use monitoring, to manage and coordinate disaster response and asset tracking, and will work even if objects pass under bridges or under cloud cover. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control has a department called Advanced Autonomy concerned with autonomous ground vehicles.
Better Fire Prediction and Detection
According to Smith, the group is exploring advanced technologies to help firefighters better predict, detect, and fight wildfires. The technology could predict and locate a fire hours before it even starts from a lightning strike. Using the power of AI, Lockheed’s technology could also analyze fire behavior in near real-time to enable fire growth predictions and to deliver persistent communications across multiagency air and land suppression units, so they might respond quicker to a large complex fire. Unfortunately, the technology is only in test mode; it’s not currently helping fight the fires ravaging southern California, said Smith.
Moderator Julie Shah, Department Head and H.N. Slater Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discussed how much the world has changed in the context of AI over the last two decades.
Continually Evolving AI Systems
“When I did my Ph.D., it was on automated planning and scheduling with no machine learning,” recalled Shah. “When I started my career on faculty, I remember a colleague at NASA told me … nothing that learns online will ever fly in space. In the blink of an eye, a few years later, all I did in my lab was machine learning.”
Pavone agreed with Shah that future aerospace missions, especially for space exploration, will need AI systems that can continue to evolve and learn after they deploy.
“Adaptation is needed and so that’s something we are working on,” said Pavone, noting that his lab is collaborating with The Aerospace Corporation on AI systems that can serve anomalies – “How do you use those anomalies to train your system on the ground so that you can still do validation and then improve it?”
Following the panel, Pavone emphasized that foundation models, dark language, and vision language models all provide “several opportunities to rethink how we build autonomous systems.”
He pointed to several breakthroughs in simulation technologies, which will make simulation a powerful tool of autonomous systems.
Aerospace: Lessons from Automotive’s AI Experience
Pavone added that while the application domain he focuses on at Nvidia is primarily automotive (self-driving cars), aerospace researchers can learn from the automotive industry.
“The automotive [industry] has been building AI systems for a while now, and they have built quite a bit of competence in terms of which AI system should be fielded and also how to provide that they are safe and reliable. So, both the methodologies and the safety standards that have been developed by the automotive community could be useful for the aerospace community,” he said.
Forum Attendees Weigh In On AI
Following the plenary, Jorge Hernandez, president of Texas-based Bastion Technologies, said, “Just the opportunity to hear how different organizations are working with AI was fantastic. What Stanford, Lockheed, and MIT are doing is exceptional. We’re all interested in seeing how that will impact us in the future…and we’re all interested getting involved.”
His firm focuses on safety and mission assurance and mechanical engineering, said Hernandez. “We get involved on the risk and analysis side, so how AI plays into that will be an important piece of what we do.”
Rudy Al Ahmar, a PhD student who is completing his aerospace engineering studies at Auburn University’s Advanced Propulsion Research Laboratory this semester, agreed with the panelists – there was a lot of skepticism about AI and machine learning five years ago, but those concerns were addressed within a few years. The same thing has happened with generative AI.
“For a lot of scientists and researchers, it’s not a matter of if they’re going to use AI and machine learning, it’s a matter of when and how they’re going to implement it – whether on a large scale or small scale,” he said.
The doctoral candidate said he hopes to research AI and machine learning integration with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a university assistant professor.
“It’s computationally demanding to work on these aerospace applications with CFD. AI and machine learning can reduce the computational cost and make things rapid so you can optimize and study things much, much quicker.”
On Demand Recording Available
Advanced Air Mobility, AI Crucial Topics Planned for 2025 AIAA AVIATION Forum
By Jeremy Wang, Co-founder and COO, Ribbit
The AIAA AVIATION Forum is the venue to tackle both longstanding challenges from detect-and-avoid – to emerging trends like how we’re dealing with decarbonization – combined with autonomy and sustainability coming together on the same platforms.
The event is regarded as the forefront of aviation business, research, development, and technology. This year’s theme, “Navigating the Future: Sustainability, Safety, and Innovation.” I am particularly excited that the program we’ve designed promises to deliver insights about the future of advanced air mobility (AAM) and autonomy.
We expect over 2,500 aviation professionals from academia, industry and government to attend the 2025 AIAA AVIATION Forum on 21–25 July in Las Vegas.
Convergence of Autonomy and Sustainability
An example of convergence is Joby Aviation’s landmark emission-free hydrogen-electric flight last summer that demonstrated the potential for emissions-free regional travel. The air taxi featured a hydrogen-based power plant on board.
There’s talk about hybrid electric being incorporated into some of the newer eVTOL aircraft concepts to try and address the range challenges of pure battery systems.
Must-see Sessions
The Forum’s opening plenary and Forum 360 will give us a glimpse into the aviation industry in 2050. Our opening speakers will share their insights that will define aviation in the next three decades.
“Injecting intelligence,” or bringing together autonomy, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning into platforms, will serve as one of the daylong themes of the conference.
The world is entering a state of increased tension between longstanding adversaries and democratic countries. That’s spurring a lot of pressure for us to innovate more quickly and to onboard new capabilities sooner than we ever have in the past. Three of the Forums 360 panel discussions will cover some of the biggest challenges and opportunities. One will cover U.S. collaborative combat aircraft developments, featuring the director of the U.S. Air Force’s 40th Test Flight Squadron from Eglin Air Force Base and the deputy director of Data & Analytics Enablement for National Defense Canada.
A key theme with autonomy is the concept of affordable mass, a strategy for developing and deploying low-cost weapon systems and aircraft to counter high-volume adversary capabilities.
There is a huge capability gap between the large Predator and Reaper UAS and the tiny drones used in defense. In this “Goldilocks zone,” aircraft can be scaled to better address the threats from integrated air defense systems.
Autonomy is going to be pretty critical to operating in the kind of environment we’re now seeing in Eastern Europe and increasingly over the Indo Pacific and possibly the Arctic.
We also will be exploring the role of AI and new types of sensors in these autonomous systems and how they should be certified, as well as concepts of human machine teaming and human autonomy teaming.
Finally, the “AI Certification: Busting the Myth” session will address the most prevalent misconceptions about AI technologies in aviation, ranging from “AI will one day directly control aircraft” to “AI systems are not safe.” The speakers will ground the talk in conceptual, scientific evidence and practical, operational experience.
To hear from dozens of expert speakers and join us in the conversation, register now for 2025 AIAA AVIATION Forum, 21–25 July, Las Vegas.
About the Author
Jeremy Wang, a third-year member of the AIAA AVIATION Forum’s Guiding Coalition, is the co-founder and COO of Ribbit, a venture-backed startup developing dual-use autonomous aircraft to serve rural, coastal, and remote regions. Ribbit is credited with the first fully automated gate-to-gate flight in Canada and serving federal contracts delivering advanced autonomy for air and joint operations. Prior to Ribbit, Wang was the CTO of Canada’s top-ranked commercial drone operator where he oversaw the development of special-purpose drones for industrial and defense applications.
Register now for AIAA AVIATION Forum
The 2025 AIAA AVIATION Forum is your direct flight to the forefront of aviation business, research, development, and technology. Registration is now open.
Register for the event here and save before the 23 June Early Bird deadline.