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Working Groups
In 2014, the Vertical Flight Society (then known as AHS International) held the world's first technical meeting on electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft. This first Transformative Vertical Flight (TVF) Workshop brought together leading innovators and visionaries from industry, academia and government. The annual workshops were renamed the VFS Electric VTOL Symposiums in 2019, and remained the largest annual gathering of the eVTOL community.
Founded at the third TVF Workshop in 2017, a community of aerospace professionals that includes technical, regulatory, and business elements have been coming together to support the potential for new forms of air transportation systems, with a focus on systems that embody distributed electric propulsion and vertiport capabilities. This community has been pursuing its interest through the TVF Working Groups (WG), which have been organized around these primary TVF missions identified by participants and organizers of previous TVF workshops:
- Commercial Air Transport — On-demand air taxi, regional scheduled flight service, and cargo distribution and package delivery.
- Public Services – Search and rescue, law enforcement, medevac, emergency, humanitarian and military applications.
Objective
The objective of the WGs is to establish a formal means of continually refining current versions of the Transformative Vertical Flight Roadmap to create an increasingly compelling argument for pursuing this capability.
Each Working Group will be tasked with maturing the TVF Roadmap Mission Element which is the WG’s assigned responsibility. The current version of the TVF Roadmap is the product of previous workshops and is available as a starting point for the WGs. Each Roadmap element (mission) is subdivided into topics and subtopics relevant to the missions. A matrix showing the perceived correlation of each subtopic to the WG's element is provided for initial guidance. The WGs may recommend changing the perceived relevance of a subtopic during the course of their deliberations. The subtopic rows in each Roadmap element have been prepopulated with activities positioned in time frames that were identified by prior TVF workshop participants. These activities have not been vetted by any peer review to establish their viability, timing, or interdependency with other activities. It will be the WG’s responsibility to move, modify, add or delete activities in their Roadmap Element, using a peer consensus-based process, to arrive at a reasonable description of the events, activities, milestones, and deliverables that will be necessary to achieve a variety of desirable TVF outcomes (mission concepts, technology, regulations, and markets). The WGs are also expected to coordinate the descriptions of their activities with the other Working Groups’ elements (missions) where appropriate to ensure a fully integrated self-consistent TVF Roadmap.
Process
This website serves as a portal to assist in the establishment, membership recruitment, and continued effective operation of TVF Roadmap Working Groups. Individuals with an interest in contributing to the advancement and realization of Transformative Vertical Flight as a new form of air transportation are encouraged to volunteer as a TVF Working Group member.
The Working Group Leader (WGL) sets the group's agenda in consultation with the members. This includes defining objectives, deliverables, timelines, and scheduling meetings. The WGLs need to maintain good communication with their counterparts to ensure coordination for effective integration of their Roadmap Elements. WG will have an Internet URL to access a virtual meeting space to facilitate information sharing and collaboration. The WGL is responsible for posting meeting times on the WG’s calendar page and coordinating with other WGs to de-conflict meetings. This will permit members to attend other WG meetings to enhance communication and coordination. The WGL is also responsible for providing the WG’s products in the form of updates to be incorporated into the reference version of the TVF Roadmap.
Background
The first workshop, held in 2014, identified the existence of a multi-disciplinary community interested in this topic and established a consensus that further collaborations in this area were warranted. In 2015, a second workshop focused on four desired outcomes:
- Identify areas of potential interdisciplinary collaborations
- Collaborate on new conceptual design tools
- Establish a community to develop regulatory guidelines
- Ensure key U.S. Government agencies understand industry interest in establishing new vertiport capable flight markets.
The third workshop in 2016 built on the work of the previous workshops by soliciting expert opinions from the participants on the work and timeframes needed to transform air transportation consistent with the TVF vision. These inputs serve as a starting point for the development of an advocacy roadmap needed to generate support for TVF transportation systems, technology, and markets.
The TVF roadmap generated during the third workshop was a significant step forward but requires further refinement and vetting before it will be a creditable advocacy tool. To facilitate the collection of Workshop participants’ ideas for future TVF efforts and the timeframes they envisioned, activities were organized into four categories: Missions-Operational Concepts; Prioritized Technical Challenges; Market-Business Opportunities; and Regulatory & User Requirements. To obtain a roadmap that can serve as a strong advocacy tool, it will be necessary to break these elements down into the next level of detail.
The approach to improve the roadmap fidelity is to establish focused working groups (WGs) with approximately a dozen members each to refine targeted areas of the roadmap. This website was created to provide a portal to enable volunteers to join WGs and contribute to their areas of interest. This portal also provides a means for WG members to access tools like virtual meeting spaces, document sharing sites, and rosters of WG leads and members to assist with their tasks.
Interested in joining a working group? Contact:
Working Group Leader, Andrew Mearns: andy@multicopter.aero