Identification of weather information gaps for general aviation and uncrewed operations
Abstract
Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) represent a rapidly growing industry, with a market value of $20.8 billion in 2021 projected to grow to half a trillion dollars in 2028, and Urban Air Mobility is projected to grow from $3 billion in 2021 to $8.9 billion in 2028.. However, these fields will require advances in both air traffic management and weather systems. Existing aviation weather systems focus on weather at airports and at altitude, while UAM and UAS will both need low altitude, higher fidelity weather observation tools and prediction models. Weather Intelligent Navigation Data and Models for Aviation Planning (WINDMAP) is a NASA University Led Initiative which aims to tackle the development of next generation weather systems for UAM and UAS. Part of developing the next generation weather systems is designing the front-end applications which consumers will use to obtain and interpret weather data. To develop front-end products, as well as inform requirements for back-end products, it is important to determine customer needs, and identify customers’ perceived gaps in current weather information systems. GA pilots as a group have been extensively studied for decades and their opinions and usage of weather information sources have been well documented, however UAS operators as a group have only existed for as long as their industry, and as such there is little research on them or their perceptions of weather sources. I conducted a survey to gain insight into the perceptions of both GA pilots and UAS operators to determine what weather elements they care about, what weather sources they use, what their limits are, and how they compare with each other. In the survey I found UAS operators with GA experience tend to use GA weather information sources for UAS operations, suggesting modeling future weather information systems on existing ones might work well. UAS operators tend to care most about surface winds, precipitation, and low temperatures. Additionally, I provide suggestions for future research on UAS operators based on my experience gained from conducting the survey.
Collections
- OSU Theses [15752]