Safety Analysis of Landing Control for Flying Cars Under Single-Pilot Operation (SPO)

Flying cars are an important vehicle for future urban air mobility. Mainstream flying cars predominantly adopt the e-VTOL-like configuration. Unlike traditional aircraft, these flying cars must be operated by a single pilot. The corresponding hybrid ground-flight control scheme remains immature, with only a few reliability analyses focused on flight safety. Based on the single-pilot operation (SPO) concept, this paper designs a hybrid control scheme for e-VTOL-like flying cars and proposes a restricted driving mode for the the take-off and landing stages and an autonomous driving mode for the cruising stage, respectively. Taking the landing phase as an example, a fault mode analysis and fault tree analysis are conducted for the restricted driving mode, focusing on factors that are sensitive to flight safety. A fault probability analysis is performed of the landing control unit in the restricted driving mode. The calculated probability of the top event occurring is 1.98 × 10−8 per flight, which proves the feasibility of the design meets the safety requirements. This study provides a foundation for a safety assessment of driving modes in future designs of flying cars.