QSS’s Study on eVTOL Ride Quality

Crown Consulting‘s vision of the future aerial mobility market

In 2018, NASA selected Crown Consulting to aid in understanding the potential barriers to creating the aerial mobility industry. After creating that study, Crown is now extending its analysis by partnering with QSS (Quantitative Scientific Solutions) to understand how eVTOL ride quality might affect community acceptance. While Crown Consulting will facilitate the analysis, QSS will assist in collecting the and assembling the relevant data.

According to QSS and Crown Consulting, past work has related passenger comfort to noise and vibration, but no measure has yet been developed relating acceptance to the combination of noise, vibration, and vehicle motion. Since eVTOLs will certainly have different motion dynamics from helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, QSS and Crown consider these motion dynamics a key variable in determining the probability of community acceptance. Research and data collection will focus gaining an understanding of how future passengers may react to new motion dynamics.

QSS is a scientific and technical consulting and analytics firm based in Arlington, VA. Its mission is to provide creative solutions to the most challenging scientific problems through hard data, and it utilizes the most advanced technologies available to conduct analysis.

Crown Consulting’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Tom Edwards, commented, “This work will enable resolution of a major barrier to successful implementation of UAM.” Crown considers itself an expert in providing data and analytics to both private and government organizations. Read the full study so far provided by Crown Consulting to NASA here.

Why it’s important: With the advanced data collection and analysis technologies now available through companies like QSS, it has become possible to create deep understandings of how new innovations in air travel might affect people in the near future. Through partnering with QSS, Crown Consulting will be able to understand with a fair degree of certainty how people will react to eVTOLs’ new motion dynamics before aircraft even enter the flight testing stages or manufacturing stages. This information can help drive both vehicle designs and government regulations.