Majed Swaid

• German Aerospace Center (DLR)

The implementation of urban air mobility represents a complex challenge in aviation due to the high degree of innovation required across various domains to realize it. From the use of advanced aircraft powered by novel technologies, the management of the airspace to enable high density operations, to the operation of vertiports serving as a start a...

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) addresses future transportation challenges by extending networks into the air, helping cities like Hamburg overcome infrastructural limitations. Ground-based infrastructures (GBIs) are crucial for integrating AAM, connecting air and ground transport through subsystems like landing areas, gates, and terminals, tailored to...

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has emerged as a potential game changer for urban transportation, promising faster, more efficient and affordable services. However, beyond the visionary concepts, it is crucial to explore and discuss the opportunities and challenges of UAM and vertidrome operations also from a research perspective. The DLR research project...

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a new air transportation system for passengers and cargo in urban environments, enabled by new technologies and integrated into multimodal transportation systems. The vision of UAM comprises the mass use in urban and suburban environments, complementing existing transportation systems and contributing to the decarbonizat...

Dieser Artikel stellt den methodischen Prozess einer Szenarienentwicklung sowie einer simulationsgestützten Analyse für die bodengebundene Infrastruktur von UAM dar. Als innovative Lösung verspricht UAM im Personentransport Angebote im Gesamtverkehr zu schaffen, um das zukünftige Mobilitätsangebot in Metropolregionen zu verbessern. Die Gestaltun...

While different vehicle configurations enter the AAM market, airlines declare different ticket fares for their operations. This research investigates the operating cost of an airline and the economic viability with the announced fare per km rates. For this purpose, three use cases in the metropolitan area of Hamburg showcase representative applicat...

The increasing level of urbanisation and traffic congestion promotes the concept of urban air mobility (UAM), which has become a thriving topic in engineering and neighbouring disciplines. The development of a suitable ground-based infrastructure is necessary to supply these innovative vehicles, which mainly includes networks of takeoff and landing...

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) presents a complex challenge in aviation due to the high degree of innovation required across multiple domains to realize it. From the use of advanced aircraft powered by new technologies, the management of the urban air space to enable high density operations, to the operation of specialized vertidromes serving as a start...

Current technological developments open up the possibility of implementing airborne passenger transport in urban areas. The concepts for urban air transport are mostly based on so-called vertiports and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles with rotary wings. Depending on the function of a vertiport in a network, various configurations are r...

For the future of urban mobility, further developments in the fields of automation, communication and energy storage technologies will enable the expansion of traffic space into the air. Various concepts and scenarios of urban air mobility (UAM) are already part of current research. In addition to the investigation of relevant physical effects and...

Non-CO2 effects, like ozone production and contrail cirrus formation, account for about 50-75% of aviation's climate impact, which can be effectively mitigated by re-routing flights around highly climate-sensitive areas, like ice-supersaturated regions (ISSRs). With electric drives forming no contrails and binding all life-cycle emissions to the gr...

In line with the Gartner Hype Cycle the perception of advanced air mobility (AAM) is already fading before the continuous market entry phase begins. In this time, there are many projects focused on the development of new vehicle configurations and designs. But most of the available funding is concentrated on a few vehicle projects. It seems that th...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-3197.vid Efficiency, safety, feasibility, sustainability and affordability are among the key characteristics of future urban mobility. The project “HorizonUAM – Urban Air Mobility Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR)” provides first answers to this vision by pooling existing competenc...

The operational concept of aerodynamic formation flight, also referred to as aircraft wake-surfing for efficiency (AWSE), has high potential in terms of fuel savings and climate impact mitigation. In order to implement this concept, many technological and operational challenges have to be coped with. As the fuel consumption during a mission strongl...

The aerodynamic formation flight, which is also known as aircraft wake-surfing for efficiency (AWSE), enables aircraft to harvest the energy inherent in another aircraft’s wake vortex. As the thrust of the trailing aircraft can be reduced during cruise flight, the resulting benefit can be traded for longer flight time, larger range, less fuel consu...

The current push in automation, communication, and electrical energy storage technologies has the potential to lift urban mobility into the sky. As several urban air mobility (UAM) concepts are conceivable, all relevant physical effects as well as mutual interrelations of the UAM system have to be addressed and evaluated at a sufficient level of fi...

The aerodynamic formation flight is expected to enable high fuel savings for a trailing aircraft as the energy of the wake of a leading aircraft can be used to reduce the fuel burn. However, the extend of these benefits strongly depends on the routing of the aircraft especially if wind effects are taken into account. Within this work, the optimal f...

We lay out a methodology for optimizing supersonic flight paths by calculating sonic boom carpets of supersonic flight trajectories in specific atmospheric conditions, supposing that sonic booms must not make landfall.

Hybrid laminar flow control (HLFC) on transport aircraft is one of many promising fuel reduction technologies. However, due to high sensitivities of HLFC toward operational boundary conditions, estimations of its overall benefit are usually afflicted with large uncertainties. Among the critical environmental factors is the degradation of laminarity...

The paper analyzes the influence of wind on the optimal rendezvous and separation points of a two-aircraft aerodynamic formation flight. For a set of origin and destination airports the optimal formation routing is determined for each day of the year 2012 using an optimal control approach and a pattern search optimization to maximize the benefits e...

Within this study, a method is proposed that allows an effective fuel planning for a follower aircraft in aerodynamic formation flight missions. The special characteristic of such formation missions in the context of fuel planning is the uncertainty of the successful formation execution. The required trip fuel of the follower, therefore, strongly d...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of cloud encounter mitigation procedures on operational and economic effectiveness of aircraft with hybrid laminar flow control (HLFC) based on real-world flight routes and weather data. The goal is to evaluate whether cloud mitigation procedures are an appropriate measure to maximize the exp...

Although conventional multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithms (MOEAs) are proven to be effective in general, they are less superior when applied to solve a large-scale combinational real-world optimization problem with tightly coupled decision variables. For the purpose to enhance the capability of MOEAs in such scenarios, one may cons...