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Title: Wisk Aero, NASA Sign 5-Year Partnership To Advance Sustainable
Autonomous Flights

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/21/2...

Wisk Aero and NASA have signed a new five-year partnership to advance the
safe integration of autonomous, all-electric aircraft into U.S. airspace,
focusing on urban air mobility and regulated eVTOL flight. Electrek reports:
Wisk Aero shared details of its refreshed partnership with NASA this week.
The autonomous aviation specialist has signed a new five-year Non-
Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA) with the renowned space
administration. Per Wisk, this new agreement focuses on critical research led
by NASA's Air Traffic Management Exploration (ATM-X) project, which is
centered around the advancement of commercialized autonomous aircraft travel
under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the National Airspace System (NAS). As
a specialist in autonomous, zero-emission aircraft, Wisk intends to continue
its research alongside NASA to help regulators determine future eVTOL flight
procedures and capabilities in the US. Regulatory developments on the to-do
list for the latest NRSAA include optimizing airspace and route designs for
highly automated UAM operations, establishing critical aircraft and ground-
based safety system requirements for autonomous flight in urban environments,
and establishing Air Traffic Control (ATC) communication protocols and
procedures for seamless integration of future UAM aircraft. To achieve these
goals, Wisk said its research with NASA will more specifically focus on
utilizing advanced simulation and Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) flight
environments, which combine live flights with a simulated airspace to enable
researchers to assess future operations. The teams from Wisk and NASA already
met last month, continuing their research while beginning to determine how
instrument flight procedures and advanced technologies can work together to
enable safe autonomous passenger flights by 2030. Wisk Aero is a wholly owned
subsidiary of Boeing based in California. The aerospace manufacturer said
last year that it expects its pilotless air-taxi to begin carrying passengers
"later in the decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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