‘Building the future of autonomous aviation, means thinking beyond the aircraft’

Late last year, Boeing’s joint venture SkyGrid released its blueprint for AAM operations.
The plan sets out how SkyGrid’s ground-based system will deliver high-assurance third-party services to assist airspace integration of AAM and increasingly autonomous aviation under current Visual Flight Rules (VFR) and Instrument Flight Rules (IFR).
As the first commercial third-party service provider to release a concept of operations (ConOps) focused on how approved services will support AAM, SkyGrid’s CEO Jia Xu tells us the firm is addressing the “elephant in the room”.
That elephant being the absence of scalable infrastructure for low-altitude air traffic management. This is currently something which operators must build themselves — think Eve Air Mobility’s Vector product or Joby’s work with NASA.
“I mentioned this to my team recently: we always say, it doesn’t hurt to write things down,” says Xu. “ConOps is a bit of a strange thing in the sense that it’s often used in a defence context before AAM came along and started to make use of the term. This is because the defence context is usually preoccupied with large, complex systems of systems and they have to understand how all these pieces fit together.”
The ConOps publication outlines SkyGrid’s view of AAM, detailing how third-party services integrate into the ecosystem to support operations with the goal of eventually going autonomous. It will also serve as a tool for defining approval processes with regulatory agencies like the FAA and EASA.
“We feel that it’s very important to lay out a systemic view of AAM and autonomous aviation. Laying out the ecosystem view, formalising third-party services — which is referred to as PSU [Provider of Services for UAM], as things to enable autonomous aircraft integration, as surveillance systems, as CNS systems for AAM. We want to formalise that and name it so the industry can tackle it and then situate it inside the ecosystem. For us this ConOps is an important tool to show leadership on the subject.”
The ConOps is split into two phases. Phase one, for the next few years, will focus on building data pipelines and functionalities for the initial integration of autonomous aircraft. Phases two and three, which will see SkyGrid introduce autonomous decision-making tools for both operators and air navigation service providers to enable fully digitised and automated airspace operations.
“The high-level strategy is that we need to build the plumbing first. So, phase one will see us build the data pipelines and get functionalities in there to enable the integration of autonomous aircraft. Phases two and three will layer additional decision-making and airspace automation tools that will be useful from both operator and air navigation service provider perspectives.”
Zooming out to look at where SkyGrid fits within the wider AAM ecosystem, Xu says aircraft developers in the space feel the responsibility to develop infrastructure like ground surveillance, communications or navigation systems falls to them. This means the technology stack of companies like Wisk and Reliable Robotics goes much deeper than the aircraft they are developing.
“But that is not ultimately how I think you run a business and an industry. You need modularisation and composability. You also need other people to bring those services as an approved package so that you can go and do what you want to do — whether that be an autonomous operation or a crewed eVTOL service.
This is what I mean by the elephant in the room. We assume these parts of the stack exist, we assume these companies are building them, but we all know that is not the sustainable path forward,” adds Xu.
It is by creating this so-called “approved package” that SkyGrid plans to make money. Xu says the company deeply believes that an entity is required that wraps up all of the required data into one product.
“SkyGrid is a bit peculiar in its approach when compared with others in this industry. AAM is a sector of startups who are flying sub-scales, getting things in the air. SkyGrid came from the other way. We started this journey with the desire to have safety and cyber already built in. So in some dimensions, when you look at our team and office, we look like a startup in software, but in other dimensions, we look much more like an established aerospace company with all of those affordances. And that is to accelerate the closure of this approved product.”
As noted earlier, the ConOps also helps SkyGrid to further conversations with regulators. A large part of what the company is doing is highly novel and the approval of a ground-based digital system covering the low-altitude economy is new.
Xu says the FAA and EASA, to a large extent, know how to approve aircraft, boxes on aircraft and engines and, very soon, things like batteries. But they don’t yet know how to approve a third-party digital system.
“The closest example, albeit at much lower assurance and focus on a different application, would be unmanned traffic management [UTM]. They generally work under 400ft, in segregated airspace. It is a digital airspace management and airspace integration system that also bleeds into aircraft operations. Think of SkyGrid as that, but for AAM operations,” says Xu.
“So with that kind of picture in your mind, this process of how do you even approve UTMs and how do you approve the next level up like SkyGrid is an open question. It’ll take time to gain operational experience, to get systems out there, to engage with the regulator and understand how to gain that approval. Keep an eye out for announcements about this in the days to come.”
SkyGrid envisions a collaborative global effort to digitise airspace management. And it sees that push aligning with the FAA’s Infocentric national airspace system (NAS) vision for more digitised and automated airspace, Xu adds. The company is already running end-to-end tests with Wisk to see what operations in that airspace might look like.
“We cannot and will not act alone. In the long run, the sandbox we’re creating for a connected, assured, and more automated approach to operating the airspace will serve as a viable template for digitizing and upgrading other parts of the NAS.
“And in that world, perhaps there will be opportunities for the FAA under its Infocentric NAS vision to take in more commercial services as part of its system.”
Download the full SkyGrid ConOps via the link.
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