Urban Air Mobility, a vital part of our roadmap thanks to its ability to reduce the growing pressure on our transport infrastructure

The Uspace4UAM Consortium has been selected to demonstrate Urban Air Technologies in four European countries. It is a large-scale SESAR demonstration project that addresses operational concept issues, regulations, and standards. It will also serve to build confidence in the safe and orderly integration of urban air mobility (UAM). One of the main goals is to bridge the gap between its development and implementation.

The project will study safety cases and their impact on system requirements. It will analyse how regulations and standardisation can be established to help innovators build a sustainable business case, while operating safely in a multi-modal transportation network. A series of well-defined, interactive, multi-national demonstrations will be conducted with both drones and UAM vehicles.

It is intended to generate results that will be of real interest to the “pioneers”, enabling them to create real market impact in the coming years. The project promotes a series of commercial contracts to provide fully automated drone services and presents solutions to the identified gaps towards fully autonomous urban air taxi services.

Aerial vehicle demonstrations

Three UAM and two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) demonstrations are included. The UAM demonstrations will be carried out at TECNALIA and on vertical platforms in Spain and the UK. The simulated demonstrations will be carried out on the Honeywell UAM simulator in several cities. The UAV demonstrations will be carried out in UpVision (Czech Republic) and at Dronehub (Poland).

The Electric Aircraft Laboratory of TECNALIA’s Aerospace Department has extensive experience in the electrification of aircraft systems and novel UAV architectures. It will be in charge of flying its air taxi prototype at the ATLAS Test Flight Centre (Spain), replicating an air taxi operation where all U-Space services and the necessary hardware will be tested.

Further information

The Uspace4UAM consortium brings together the entire ecosystem within Honeywell: Air Navigation Services of the Czech Republic, Altitude Angel, Austro Control, CATEC, CRIDA, DLR, DroneHub, ENAIRE, Lilium, TECNALIA, UpVision and Vertical Aerospace. It receives funding from SESAR, the public-private consortium, under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It officially started in February 2021 and will end in December 2022, including the flight demonstrations to be completed in summer 2022.

Uspace4UAM will build on the results of the CORUS project and will be synergistically linked with the new CORUS-XUAM work through the Advisory Board.