Personal air vehicle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Personal Air Vehicle or PAV is a term widely adopted by the U.S. aviation community and is used to describe a class of light general aviation aircraft which meet a specialized set of design and performance goals. NASA, in 2005, refined the definition of a PAV in describing its fifth Centennial Challenge initiative. PAVs are an emerging field of technology exploration.
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[edit] Basic Premise
The fundamental premise of this frontier technology is to make the capability of flight convenient for an individual with a reduction in the specialized skills required to operate an aircraft. The final goal being a practical “highway in the sky” scenario where an individual is able to fly from point to point with the push of a button, requiring little, if any, extra input.
[edit] Centennial Challenge PAV Definition Outline
- Seats 2 to 6 passengers.
- 200 mph (322 km/h) cruising speed.
- Quiet.
- Safe.
- Comfortable.
- Reliable.
- Able to be flown by anyone with a driver’s license.
- As affordable as travel by car or airliner.
- Near all-weather capability enabled by Synthetic Vision Systems.
- Highly fuel efficient (able to use alternative fuels).
- 800 mile (1287 km) range.
- Provide “door-to-door” travel capabilities, via vehicle roadability, or small residential airfields or vertiports with only a short walk from the aircraft to the final destination.
[edit] Current Technological Barriers To PAV Vision
A Synthetic Vision System or similar automatic flight system infrastructure does not currently exist for general aviation aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is not currently capable of handling the sizable increase in aircraft traffic that would be generated by PAVs without such a system and its required infrastructure in place. At this time (mid-2006), there are no official plans to install such an architecture in the near future. Without a large technological leap in the FAA’s method of handling air traffic, push button flight is still far from becoming a reality.
Of the two methods proposed for providing “door-to-door” capabilities, only the roadable option can be achieved utilizing existing airport facilities and ordinary roads. The FAA does not intend to build nor control small residential airports or vertiports in the near future. Currently, the only vehicles able to legally take off and land from a residential street are life-flight helicopters via special permission granted by the FAA on a case-by-case basis. Until many thousands of small residential airports are built to handle non-roadable PAVs, these vehicles will fail to achieve the goals set by NASA.
Sound is another serious problem for residential landings and take offs by PAVs. No technology currently exists that is able to quiet the noise generated by the propulsion system of an aircraft to an acceptable “suburban” level, similar to that of a revving car engine. Without lower noise levels enabling residential landing capabilities, any current PAV must still take off and land at an FAA controlled airport or private airfield, where the higher sound levels of operating aircraft have been approved.
[edit] Current Progress
Though fulfillment of the NASA vision for PAVs is likely to occur several decades from now. Several forms and categories of vehicle exist today which strive to meet the PAV definition to varying degrees of success. Some examples are:
- Flying Cars
- Light Sport Aircraft
- Sailplanes
- Touring Motor Gliders (TMG)
- Ultralights
- Vertical Take-Off and Landing Aircraft
