Abstract:
NASA has previously designed and described set of concept aircraft to serve as reference vehicles for Urban Air Mobility (UAM), to encourage public discussion and research. These vehicles are used in this paper to quantify how suitable UAM aircraft might be for missions other than their primary commercial design missions. A set of representative public good missions are described, along with design requirements and equipage. For two of these missions, the additional weight, power, and cost to facilitate a basic vehicle which may be built or configured with the ability to perform these missions is quantified. Special layout and other considerations which may impact vehicle design are described. For aircraft designed to the NASA UAM reference mission, the addition of some meaningful public good missions causes less than 10% growth in weight and power for fossil-fueled aircraft; advanced battery-electric powered aircraft grow by a significantly larger amount and may only be possible with relaxed requirements. Meaningful public good missions with UAM vehicles are feasible, provided that public good mission requirements are considered and incorporated in the conceptual design stage of development.