flightglobal.comROTORCRAFT
32 | Flight International | 28 January-3 February 2020
of MCAS is widely seen as having
played a role.
The FAA has not formalised regulations for
certificating eVTOL aircraft or rules for intra-
city autonomous flights. To help flush out
operating procedures and flight rules, Bell
was contracted last year by NASA to conduct
flights using its Autonomous Pod Transport
70 cargo drone. The company is to conduct
demonstrations in the Dallas-Fort Worth,
Texas airspace in the summer of 2020.
The company also says it is ready to volun-
In a partial break with its partner Uber – as well
as its own historical business model – Bell
plans to vertically integrate aircraft production,
flight operations and nearly everything in be-
tween, in a bid to grab a large piece of the
nascent electric vertical take-off and landing
(eVTOL) air taxi industry. The helicopter and
tiltrotor manufacturer believes that the volume
of eVTOL air taxi flights to come in the future
will require closely co-ordinated, vertically
integrated companies to ensure passenger
safety and corporate profitability.
The company is pushing headlong into
software development of a variety of applica-
tions to synchronise a tall order of business
operations. At January’s Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas, it announced the first step
in that effort; a software program named AerOS
is to be a platform for a larger suite of eVTOL
support software, including master scheduling
and real-time aircraft monitoring. The company
plans to use the software itself, but also license
it to other air taxi operators and eVTOL aircraft
manufacturers.
Bell expects thousands of eVTOL aircraft to
be operating within some major cities. The
company says choreographing such
operations, with each aircraft flying around
2,000h per year, cannot be done with human
personnel. EVTOL aircraft may be asked to
land at special urban airports, called
vertiports, deplane and then reload
passengers in 15min or less, explains Bell.
“That is incredible pace,” says Matt Holvey,
innovation manager of intelligent systems at
Bell. “You run the risk of human fatigue and
human error. A fleet of aircraft is going to
require a fleet of operators, hands on deck, all
alert, all the time. Or, you can validate software
systems, just like you validate aircraft software
systems – have autonomous systems with
human oversight, managing and overseeing
and co-ordinating this end-to-end solution.”
In addition, with battery energy density
remaining the chief limiting factor of eVTOL
aircraft, the company believes operators willneed to constantly match demand for flights
with sufficiently charged electric aircraft. That is
a balancing act that will likely be best done
using algorithms and artificial intelligence, the
firm says.
Bell aims to receive Federal Aviation
Administration certification for its eVTOL
aircraft, to be based on the recently unveiled
four-rotor Nexus 4EX demonstrator, in the mid-
2020s. It believes the air taxi industry will take
off shortly thereafter.
In advance of the eVTOL industry taking
shape, Bell is planning to roll out a suite of
software that will handle fleet scheduling,
vehicle health monitoring, cargo routing,
airspace integration, trip booking, route optimi-
sation and MRO work, among other applica-
tions. The rotorcraft manufacturer plans for its
software to be modular and as open as possible
to collaboration with other app makers and
vehicle manufacturers. “The theory behind this
is it is open and usable by any aircraft
platform,” says Holvey. “I was under specificinstructions: this needs to be open and
available and as flexible and agile as possible.”
The company acknowledges that it does not
have much of a track record in the realm of
software development. In fact, Bell formed part
of its software development team by pulling
staff from its corporate IT department. As a
starting point for building experience and ex-
pertise, the firm notes its Mission Link software,
which monitors health and usage of several of
its commercial helicopter models.
Bell’s move into the world of flight operations
and support software encroaches on the realm of
Uber, the eVTOL air taxi industry’s leading cheer-
leader, which had hoped to translate its experi-
ence helping passengers to hail rides on the
ground into a similar business model in the air.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall that it
would likely compete with traditional airfram-
ers, Uber announced on the same day Bell
revealed its AerOS software to the public – 6
January – that it would work with carmaker
Hyundai to manufacture an eVTOL aircraft. ■TECHNOLOGY
Helicopter maker charges artificial intelligence with managing eVTOL operationsteer information to the FAA such as a detailed
architecture of the Nexus 4EX’s propulsion
and flight-control systems, as well as its relat-
ed safety analysis.
In addition to public and regulatory confi-
dence in safety, Bell believes reducing the
amount of noise produced by its eVTOL air-
craft will play a crucial role in encouraging
people to accept hundreds or thousands of
aircraft buzzing overhead. The company
thinks that a decibel level in the high 70s or
low 80s, about 15 decibels quieter than atraditional helicopter, should be its noise goal
for the Nexus 4EX.
“Bell will strive for the lowest holistic
noise considering not only loudness (deci-
bels), but also tone, ambient noise and com-
munity noise tolerance,” says Drennan,
noting that people in some cities may accept
less sound than those in other regions.
“Noise is too critically linked to
performance and cost to set an arbitrary
loudness level that doesn’t take all of these
factors into account.” ■❯❯
Shutterstock
In the sky, traffic management will have to be significantly better – despite heavy volume