NASA Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Reference Vehicles
Across the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) community, a wide range of vehicle configurations and operational missions have been proposed. The NASA UAM reference vehicles have been chosen to demonstrate specific vehicle attributes representative of those proposed across the UAM community and avoid looking like any single industry solution. The reference vehicles are based upon consistent, known assumptions, and are documented and publicly available here. This will enable common reference models to be used across the UAM community as a potential means to:
- Investigate vehicle technologies and identify enabling technologies
- Expose design trades and constraints
- Explore a range of UAM mission requirements / concepts of operation
- Simulate vehicle operations; for example, air traffic management simulation and planning, fleet noise, and passenger acceptability studies
- Tackle barriers to airworthiness and certification; for example, propulsion architecture, manufacturing, and reserve requirements
- Focus tools and methods development towards the needs of UAM.
We have included supporting documents for the reference vehicles below, including:
- Documentation that describes the conceptual design of the vehicle
- A representative geometry of the vehicle in OpenVSP
- The NDARC script used to size and perform mission analysis on the vehicle
