HAMPTON, Va. - Over the next month, millions will take to the skies to travel for the holidays.
It's a lot for air traffic controllers to manage. Now, imagine throwing countless air taxis with people inside just looking to get from A to B?
Researchers at NASA Langley Research Center say it's only a matter of time.
“My understanding is there's several hundred companies that are working actively to build air taxis around the world," said Neil O'Connor, an Assistant Branch Head for NASA Crew Systems and Aviation Operations.
One of the companies, Joby Aviation, just test-flew an electric air taxi in New York City for the first time, an airspace that includes three major airports.
For local engineers, it's hard not to imagine the implications for traffic in Hampton Roads should air taxi service make its way here.
"Think about getting around congestion and using the air as a mode of transportation getting through the traffic congestion around the Hampton Roads (Bridge) Tunnel," said Nelson Guerreiro, a Senior Aerospace Engineer at NASA Langley.
But first, the Federal Aviation Administration and air traffic controllers have to figure out how to ensure safety in a world where air taxis are joining jetliners, military air vehicles and more. Guerreiro and O'Connor are part of the team inside NASA Langley's Air Traffic Operations Lab (ATOL) that's using flight simulators to figure it out.
“We're actually connecting prototype systems early on to the systems that are operating in the National Airspace System today. And that kind of impact leads to lower cost for development of technologies, earlier identification of problems where things may or may not work," Guerreiro told News 3.
The simulators inside the ATOL at Langley are attached to FAA systems in Atlantic City. Using them, engineers can "fly" in air taxis through busy airspace above Atlantic City, New York and countless other locations, simultaneously sending data to federal agencies.
O'Connor says this process includes simulating different conditions, like bad weather.
“We’ll bring in pilots, real world pilots, and they'll come in and they'll fly the scenarios and then we'll get some feedback on what a real pilot thinks how it works," O'Connor told News 3, adding that this next phase of research is still a couple years away.
After that, the team will have to simulate an environment where air taxis are in the mainstream with thousands flying through the sky over the U.S.
"The industry would like to have these operations happening in the next couple of years," said Guerreiro. "Within the next 10 years, we could get to that level where the scalability is such that these are widely available modes of transportation.”
Yes, the third dimension of short-distance travel will be here before we know it and local engineers are working to make sure there's space.
