Distributed Simulation Evaluation of Digital Communications for Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

NASA's Air Mobility Pathfinders (AMP) Project conducted collaborative simulation within a Class Bravo Airspace utilizing the High-Level Architecture (HLA) Standard for Distributed Simulation as the foundation. In this paper, we describe the evaluation of a notional, bi-directional digital communications tool between the UAM Pilot-In-Command (PIC) and legacy Air Traffic Control (ATC) that is intended to reduce voice communication over frequency channels. First, we describe the ideation of the digital communications capability. Next, we focus on the software development between the software engineering groups. Then, we discuss input from ATC experts incorporated into the capability. Finally, we outline the interactions between the simulated UAM PICs and ATC using the digital communications capability and some of the key findings for future research.