Curious Universe: Building Highways in the Sky

01I grew up in Hounslow, United Kingdom, just outside of London, about 30 minutes outside of London.

02You could sit on my grandfather's roof and actually watch planes as they came into land at Heathrow Airport.

03They were so close, not only would the house shake, but you could actually read the tail numbers, the little letters that are on the back of the aircraft.

04You could actually read them, that's how close they were.

05I was fascinated by these aircraft.

06How the heck are these vehicles taking off and flying?

07And that's really, that curiosity is what sparked my interest in understanding aviation.

08Knowing that the way things are today don't have to be the way things are in the future.

09We apply it to science, but that's also true for so many different realms of our life.

10The fact that we have the power to implement the things that we learn in our daily lives, we can change things.

11And I think that's really important.

12This is NASA's Curious Universe.

13Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

14I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

15It's incredible to think about how much transportation has evolved in the past few centuries.

16A journey that once took months with wagons or ships, now takes a few days in a car or train, or a few hours on an airplane.

17Our cities had to be smaller when everyone walked or rode horses.

18Now, with cars, buses, metro stations, and trains, we can build bigger communities and explore our surroundings more easily.

19But what about the next step in transportation?

20In addition to our work exploring space, NASA has an aeronautics division, which studies the science of flight.

21These scientists and engineers are looking at ways to test, improve, and invent new ways to get around.

22What if, in the future, instead of taking a taxi or subway train to get around short distances, you could ride in a flying car?

23Hi, everyone.

24My name is Shivanjali Sharma.

25I am the National Campaign Deputy Lead, and I currently serve as an aerospace research engineer based out of NASA Ames.

26Shivanjali is working on the Advanced Air Mobility Project, which is partnering with companies across the country to develop and test new aircraft vehicles.

27In the next few decades, we might be able to take those vehicles from place to place.

28So this is actually a fairly new project in terms of NASA standards.

29Several years ago, individuals, researchers, engineers, started to see how electric motors could be utilized for new propulsion systems, new types of configurations for how these vehicles were structured.

30And we noticed that there were a number of gaps that remained to be addressed to really enable this new type of aviation.

31It will be a while before these flying electric vehicles are released.

32We're still not sure exactly what this new system of transportation will look like.

33But Shivanjali and her team are working to figure it out.

34As far as this development phase goes, there are a couple of things we do know about how these vehicles will function.

35They are runway independent, meaning just like a helicopter, they could take off and land vertically.

36So you can imagine these vehicles taking off and landing on rooftops.

37And this new mode of aviation, this evolution in aviation, will really change the way that we move people and goods.

38These maneuverable aircraft could mean big changes for how we get around.

39But with such big shifts in transportation, there are a lot of things to consider.

40So what is the framework for how they'll operate?

41How will they access and integrate into our airspace?

42What other things will we need to enable these aircraft to fly every day?

43So infrastructure.

44Will they need a landing pad?

45What type of sensors or automation might be needed at the vertiport, the area in which they'll land on the ground?

46And how will airspace systems evolve to incorporate these new aircraft?

47All of those pieces are what NASA is focused on so we can really make this type of aviation transport a reality.

48Imagine with me what these vehicles mean.

49A future where we aren't just traveling along roads, train lines, or long-distance flights.

50This would be like calling a cab, and instead of a car along the road, a helicopter flies you up into the skies.

51This idea used to be pure fiction.

52But with research, planning, and a lot of innovative thinking, it could be our reality.

53If you are thinking about traveling from your home to some location, whether it's a ballpark or a concert venue, potentially you could take one of these vehicles just like you would get an Uber or a Lyft today.

54Except you wouldn't be sitting in normal traffic.

55You would be flying in one of these vehicles.

56If we think about goods being transported, if we have autonomous electric cargo vehicles, you'll be able to have goods being transported much more efficiently.

57And this will change the way in which we receive the things that we buy on Amazon every day.

58NASA engineers are also testing autonomous flight, or vehicles that can fly without a pilot.

59This would cut down on some of the risk factors often involved in getting important services into hard-to-reach areas.

60But there's other, I think, real important aspects of advanced air mobility.

61And those are associated with emergency medical services and fire services.

62Having these vehicles fly in, being able to transport for a medical purpose an individual or some sort of medical equipment or goods, that's going to be a key factor of advanced air mobility.

63The other factor is firefighting.

64So I'm based in California, and we've had quite a fire season as of late.

65Being able to fight fires with these types of new vehicles that may be able to fly into fire areas without potentially putting a pilot's life at risk is going to be a key innovation.

66So I think there's a number of areas that will change our lives, whether it's thinking about us going from point A to point B, but also in terms of our community and our safety services and our public services that we rely on every day.

67When you think about it, there are a lot of things that keep us safe when we're driving our cars down the road.

68Driver's licenses, crosswalks, traffic lights.

69We'll need similar safety precautions while navigating through the air, too.

70Without lanes and road signs, and with the added dimension of height or elevation that we don't have to worry about on the ground, how will we keep vehicles on track as they fly through the sky?

71My name is David Zahn.

72I work in the Mike Minoni Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

73I function as a bit of a liaison between NASA and the FAA for their expertise and resources for our research in urban air mobility.

74So I build roadways in the sky.

75So when we talk about airspace architecture, there's on and off ramps from the highways to landing sites.

76We have stop signs.

77We have speed zones.

78We have street lights.

79There's license plates, right?

80And driver's license for vehicles.

81And we make all these vehicles not hit each other.

82David and his team are designing all of those systems that we currently use for cars on roads and thinking about how that translates to airspace.

83They are mapping out the sky to make flying safe.

84This aspect of aerospace, planning for safety and organization, isn't new to this project.

85But it is the first time it's being done in collaboration with a new vehicle.

86If you can imagine, everything in aviation has been done in one axis at a time.

87So either we had flight or we had airspace management.

88You know, first thing you had was the Wright brothers creating aircraft and people were flying them around.

89That's one axis.

90And then we created air traffic control.

91We had this guy in a field with a green flag and a red flag.

92And so every stair step of aviation has been done.

93And again, one of those axes.

94So when we're looking at this autonomous travel, we're actually cutting that stair step in half.

95We're simultaneously introducing new vehicle technology with airspace management techniques.

96David and his team are working to make this technology easy and accessible.

97In order to facilitate such a big shift in day-to-day travel, it needs to be tested again and again.

98And saying, hey, when you do see that app or you do see that ticket that you can get on a ride-sharing service, know that it was very vetted.

99We've, you know, put years and years of research in to make sure that it's safe.

100Mike Gaminski is the Advanced Air Mobility Project Manager.

101He's been able to provide another idea of what using these vehicles could look like and what they could mean for public transportation.

102I think if you think of it more like, you know, when you get onto maybe a subway system, you would go park in a parking lot, right?

103And then you would get up on a platform and you would get on a subway stop that would take you somewhere.

104That's how we do it in the ground right now.

105You come in and you park your car and you get out and you go into maybe a little part of a terminal, like a really small condensed airport, and then somebody walks you out and maybe with four or five or six other people.

106And you get in and it just takes you like a taxi cab over a city or into a city or out of a city or things like that.

107Making this future a reality has taken a lot of creativity and innovation.

108In order to make something we can only imagine turn into a reality, you have to find somewhere to start.

109And you have to expect that not everything will go perfectly the first time.

110That's where trial and error can be science's best friend.

111In order to solve problems, we need to realize what works and just as importantly, what doesn't work.

112You've got to understand that we're doing research and development, technology development, so we're constantly learning.

113We're taking on things where we don't know all the answers, so we're doing research and development to try to figure things out as we go.

114So I think you need to be curious.

115You know, one of those people that likes to solve problems and tackle situations, and there's really no such thing as anybody that's perfect in this.

116I came into NASA and I'm working on things that I couldn't even imagine having worked on even seven, eight years ago.

117So people that are working on this will be working on things that we can't even think about today, probably.

118And you'll be working as a team, so a lot of times the solution comes up through different people who figure things out together.

119An important factor in such a huge project like this is teamwork.

120With more people involved, you get more perspectives and areas of expertise to find solutions.

121Again, this is Shivangeli Sharma.

122So teamwork is really essential.

123There is no way that a complex project like the national campaign could be accomplished by an individual.

124We have folks on our team that are engineers, yes, aerospace engineers, but we also have programmers or computer science developers.

125We also have pilots.

126Pilots play a huge role in trying to help us understand how traditional aviation functions today and how that needs to evolve.

127We have individuals that are focused on human factors.

128How a person, whether you're a pilot or someone who's maybe running an airspace service, is going to interact with their computer display in front of them in a way that makes sense.

129Testing is a crucial aspect of aeronautics engineering, and all science for that matter.

130Scientists try out their ideas, products, and theories over and over again in order to make changes and figure things out.

131We have a maxim that we use, fly, fix, fly, meaning there's things that we learn from every flight.

132And the things that we learn make the next flight even better.

133Being able to learn and iterate and progress is really essential to any research or engineering activity.

134If we think about the scientific method, right?

135So the scientific method is come up with a hypothesis, come up with your experiment.

136There's a number of other steps that I'm glossing over.

137The key aspect is that scientific method is a circle or a cycle.

138It always has to feed back into itself because you're going to learn something that impacts your hypothesis and actually changes your hypothesis.

139And that scientific method, I think, is really at the core of all NASA research.

140We don't state that we have all the right answers.

141In fact, we are explorers.

142We are curious individuals who know that there's answers that we don't have.

143And that's, I think, a really key aspect of not only flight activities, but also any research activity that we conduct across the board.

144One of the guys on our program says, you know, NASA's only into doing things that have not been done before.

145By nature, trial and error is probably the only way to figure that out.

146Again, this is David Zahn.

147Luckily, that's where you trust but verify, and you have multiple people that are cross-monitoring your performance, whether you're in the cockpit or, you know, in a control room or even in a simulator.

148NASA's aeronautics team has been testing different technologies for these new flight vehicles.

149One of the ways they do that is by getting a test pilot into the cockpit of an aircraft and monitoring how the vehicle performs.

150Let's tag along on a recent test flight.

151On this mission, test pilots are trying out different helicopter mechanisms.

152We've completed our hit-and-check, and we're ready to take off and reposition to Zero-One Hotel.

153That's the one copy, no?

154Go for that.

155National Red Striker 1-3.

156Go ahead.

157We'd like to go ahead and just get the hickey and hoax.

158Check's done, and then we'll sit back down and go to ground idle.

159The results of tests like this will serve as building blocks for all these new vehicles and transportation systems.

160Testing is so important, not only to check on the progress and safety of a project like they're doing here, but also to see what doesn't work and make adjustments.

161It might seem uncomfortable or frustrating to not get things right all the time, but in fact, these setbacks often show you're on the right track for an exciting new idea.

162I think it's the 80-20 rule.

163You want to succeed about 80% of the time, but if you're getting 100% success all the time, you're not pushing the edge.

164And if you're getting 50% of the success, you're probably pushing too much into the edge.

165There are lots of roles in any aerospace project.

166It takes a team with different skills, perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses to come together and make these grand ideas a reality.

167So I think aeronautics is much like the NBA.

168A lot of people love basketball and they only focus on the players.

169And so they think, oh, if I can't be a player or if I can't be a pilot, there's no other jobs for me to do in this industry that I would just love to be a part of, breaking the physics of the planet and flying fast or hovering or flying in the air.

170But just like basketball, there are several other supporting things that can allow you to be in that industry without being a shooter.

171You could be a coach, you could be a referee, you could be a manager, you could be all these things that support that industry.

172And I think that's the biggest takeaway from aviation.

173There's still some aerospace engineering programs, there's still some structures, there's still all these supporting things that you can be a part of this process and live the aeronautics dream of looking down on the earth and flying.

174So if I would encourage anybody that has a passion or an inkling to be part of aeronautics, again, there's more jobs than just the pilot role.

175Humanity took a huge step in 1903 with the first recorded flight.

176Now, over 100 years later, engineers like David, Shivangeli, and Mike are imagining a whole new kind of flight, a sky highway with electric, autonomous, flying vehicles delivering our packages, keeping us safe, and taking us from place to place.

177Being able to reflect back on how far we've come and dream big about the opportunities that still await us in aerospace is a testament to perseverance, trial and error, and teamwork.

178This is NASA's Curious Universe.

179This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana.

180Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

181The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold, Kate Steiner, and Michaela Sosby, with support from Emma Edmond and Priya Mittal.

182Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds.

183Special thanks to Ryland Hegey, Jamie Turner, Eric Land, David Mead, and the Advanced Air Mobility team.

184If you have a question about our universe, you can email a voice recording or send a written note to nasa-curiousuniverse at mail.nasa.gov.

185Go to nasa.gov slash curiousuniverse for more information.

186If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing with a friend.

187So, for instance, there was a NASA study for a microwave landing system called an MLS in 1983 that had very similar flight profiles to ours and some data deliverables a little different.

188This is maybe not at all where the podcast will go, but a microwave landing system like with microwaves?

189Yeah, it's a...

190No, no, no.

191It's an old, old system, but it's just a ground-based landing navigational aid.

192So, something on the ground that an aircraft receiver can ping to and then navigate towards that point.

193Got it.

194That makes much more sense than what I was imagining.

195Thank you.

196Thank you.

197Thank you.

198Thank you.

199Thank you.

200Thank you.

201Thank you.

202Thank you.