That was the theme of this conference on advanced air mobility or AAM for short (or better yet, flying cars!) that I had the honor of attending yesterday. For reference, the Federal Aviation Administration has put together this AAM webpage; in brief, the term “advanced air mobility” refers to the new generation of battery-powered aircraft that take off and land vertically, such as Hyundai’s SA-1 Air Taxi or this Lilium Jet prototype manufactured in Munich, Germany. (Also, shout out to my colleagues Timothy Ravich, Sarah Bush, and Laurie Campbell, who were awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to organize this excellent conference.) If a recording of the conference becomes available, I will post it here; in the meantime, below are three highlights:
- One highlight was the old case of State v. Yopp, 97 N.C. 477 (1887), available here, a cautionary tale that involves a North Carolina law that once made it illegal to ride bicycles on private roads; thanks to Professor Ravich for bringing this fun case to my attention.
- Another was one speaker’s definition of the now-trendy and “woke” concept of “equity”–specifically, Jacques Coulon, the Mobility Innovation Manager for the City of Orlando (my hometown!), who defined equity in terms of the spatial and temporal distribution of negative externalities generated by an activity. (A negative externality or harmful effect occurs when the production, consumption, or use of a product results in a cost to a third party.)
- A third highlight was the visualization of existing air traffic in South Florida (pictured below) presented by Greg Dyer, the Director of Aviation and Air Space Services at Woolpert, Inc.
As an added bonus, below is Aaron Koblin’s art video project “24 Hours of Flight Data”:
prior probability 