Moving From Piloted to Autonomous Operations: Investigating Human Factors Challenges in Urban Air Mobility

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is expected to be the next major revolution in the aviation industry and a solution to the growing traffic congestion on the ground. The long-term goal of UAM is to reach fully autonomous operations with minimal to no human supervision. Transitioning from today’s piloted to fully autonomous operations while maintaining or exceeding the current safety level in commercial aviation will require sig-nificant advances in technology and extensive collaboration between government, industry, and community stakeholders. In this paper, we discuss results from a focus group aimed at capturing the perspectives of five subject matter experts on the challenges associated with transitioning to fully autonomous operations. The focus group revealed five major themes for future research: overall system and automation design, training, system safety and security, community and, regulations and policy. The findings from this research highlight gaps in technology, regulations and our understanding of large-scale complex systems.