The keynote panel on Wednesday opened with Gretchen West, Senior Advisor Hogan Lovells, Co-Executive Director, Commercial Drone Alliance and MC of the show, presenting the Woman Innovator of the Year Award to Dyan Gibbens, CEO & Founder, Trumbull Unmanned and the ‘Drones for Good Award’ to Justin Adams, Director of Business Development, Kovar & Associates, LLC.
Dyan Gibbens Accepts Woman Innovator of the Year Award
Main takeaways from the discussions:
Tom Prevot, Director of Engineering, Airspace Systems, Uber Elevate, explained that they are currently creating an ecosystem of suppliers and working with building owners to create a network. The plan is to fly between Skyports up to a maximum of 60 miles apart. These will be on the tops of buildings and at airports. They will be flying up to 15,000 feet, possibly in carve-outs or air corridors. The customer will click on the app and be offered a flight or a ride. The aim is to provide a seamless journey using Uber car to Skyport then onwards by foot or Uber car again, all at the same price as an UBER X
Jerome Ferguson, Director of Autonomous Systems, United Parcel Service (UPS), presented the UPS Foundation project in Africa, where, with Zipline they have already flown 1500 deliveries in Rwanda in 12 months. UPS does not see drone deliveries as a replacement but rather an extension of their service. 1 mile gained equals $50M per year in economy or free up more time for customer service.
Robert Parks, Senior Technical Fellow, eVTOL Chief Engineer, Aurora Flight Sciences. Aurora probably has the most experience with UAS and OPAs and interestingly is now developing Alias, a robotic co-pilot that sits in the plane and moves the levers.
Adi Singh, Principal Scientist, Ford Motor Company, explained that the company is transforming itself from being an automobile manufacturer to become a multi-model transport company developing an eco-system. He believes that changing public perception of drones will help ease the regulatory process.
Eric Mueller, Aerospace Engineer, NASA, views urban air mobility as an on demand service and preaches an incremental approach to developing a UTM system. They are currently working closely together with industry and he underlined the need to share technology- UAS have to be able to communicate with each other so some sharing of IP is necessary. Government and industry need to work together to make urban air mobility work
At the end of the session, Gretchen asked the all-important TIME LINE QUESTION and what might influence progress.
- For Aurora – the technology exists, it’s a people issue.
- For UBER – energy storage is an issue, but by 2020 vehicles should meet criteria of efficiency. UBER recommends a holistic approach – community acceptance, regulations, incremental development – which is essential to being able to progress. Using carve-outs and air corridors will help in process.
- For NASA – rushing straight to autonomous won’t work – we will need OPA in a transitional stage. It will need 400 times the number of aircraft in the sky today to reduce road traffic by 1%, so an incremental approach is to be recommended..
But finally only UBER came up with a clear time-line:
2020 – demo flights
2023 -production flights
2025 – scale flights with a pilot for safety
2030 – fully autonomous unmanned flights at scale