Tag: Mark Moore

Mainstreaming Urban Air Mobility

Panelists: Moderator Bruce Holmes, vice president for digital aviation, SmartSky Networks LLC; Carl Dietrich, chief technology officer and co-founder, Terrafugia; Mark Moore, director of engineering, Uber Elevate; Mark Cousin, senior vice president of flight demonstrators, Airbus; Brian Yutko, vice president of research and development, Aurora Flight Sciences

By Tom Risen, Aerospace America staff reporter (2017-2018)

Companies are building and testing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs, to ferry people above car traffic, but they need to be safe, affordable and energy-efficient to become part of a daily commute. Entrepreneurs and engineers detailed how their companies are tackling these challenges Jan. 10 during the “Dude, Where’s My Flying Car” panel at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

To build an urban air mobility ecosystem for these aircraft, vehicle manufacturers will have to coordinate with numerous types of organizations, including real estate providers to create landing pads known as skyports, said Mark Moore, director of engineering at California-based Uber Elevate.

“We will never build a vehicle, but we want to make sure that our partners who are building vehicles are successful and that these aircraft are as community-friendly as possible,” Moore said, explaining Uber Elevate’s partnership with manufacturers and regulatory agencies to clear the way for Uber to provide on-demand flight through a mobile app. Some of the companies partnering with Uber have not publicly released their aircraft concepts, so Moore unveiled a “common reference model” that illustrates some of the challenges these electric aircraft will face, including battery energy density and noise pollution.

“The batteries are almost there, because the longest distance we need to travel in between skyports is only 45 miles,” Moore said.

Noise and expense are two of the major reasons helicopters are not more widely used for urban transport, and eVTOLs will have to improve upon both to gain public acceptance, said Mark Cousin, senior vice president of flight demonstrators at Airbus.

Cousin predicted there would be “a multitude” of aircraft designs for the new generation of urban air mobility, referring to the numerous types of cars on the road. Airbus holds true to that example: a prototype of its CityAirbus air taxi will test fly at the end of 2018, he said. A full-scale demonstrator of the tandem tilt-wing Vahana aircraft by Airbus’ Silicon Valley arm, A3 [pronounced “A cubed”], “will fly within the next month,” he said.

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Making Aerial Ride Sharing a Reality

Speaker: Mark Moore, director of aviation, Uber

By Tom Risen, Aerospace America Staff Reporter (2017-2018)

City-dwellers spend hours in traffic, but the wave of companies building electric vertical takeoff and landing craft, or eVTOLs, could allow commuters to fly above gridlock, Mark Moore, the engineering director of aviation for Uber, said June 9 at the 2017 AIAA AVIATION Forum in Denver.

Prior to joining Uber in February, Moore worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center as the principal investigator for the X-57 aircraft being built to test new electric propulsion technology, which capped off his 32-year career with NASA. Moore is using his knowledge of the electric propulsion community to build the Uber Elevate ecosystem by partnering with electric charging companies and real estate firms to create infrastructure for landing, flying and charging eVTOLs.

Uber is not building its own aircraft, but its aerospace partners so far include Aurora Flight Sciences, Slovenia-based electric plane maker Pipistrel, Bell Helicopter, Brazil-based Embraer and general aviation manufacturer Mooney. Creating this ecosystem could make eVTOLs a more efficient, safer and less noisy option for broad use in an urban environment than helicopters, Moore said.

“Helicopters are simply not good enough,” he said, touting the potential for aerial ride sharing using eVTOLs that aim to be affordable enough for most consumers because electric power is more efficient. “Ten percent of millennials say they never want to own a car.”

Moore said Uber aims for aircraft provided by its partners to conduct the initial experimental flights for the Uber Elevate aerial ride-sharing program in 2020 in Dallas and Dubai and expects to begin offering aerial ride sharing to consumers in 2023 in those cities.

Obstacles to aerial taxi services include not only gaining public acceptance with low noise and affordability, but also proving their safety to the FAA. Limits on how far apart aircraft can fly between each other in Class B airspace near airport traffic areas could make it difficult to fly numerous air taxis in a city if that regulation is not addressed.

Uber is working with the FAA on how to prove the safety of eVTOLs that could launch and charge from “vertiports,” including at unused helicopter pads, he said. If regulators certify the eVTOL ride-sharing ecosystem, it could set the stage for “clean electricity to be the dominant energy for the future,” he said.

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