Support and Maintenance Strategies for Future, Innovative and Largely Widespread Air Personal Transportation Systems

The aim of the paper is to present innovative and futuristic support and maintenance strategies applicable to a personal transportation aircraft which could be a substitution of the car in the medium-long term future. The paper, by using personal transportation aircraft as case study, presents results of simulation studies for demonstrating the effectiveness of the innovative futuristic support and maintenance strategies in a typical metropolitan scenario. Our vision is that in a medium-long term future a small but significant percentage of people, who live in the countryside, could use everyday a PTA (personal transportation aircraft) for reaching the job-place and returning home. Users of PTA will experience a significant improvement in the quality of life, moreover a reduction of traffic jam on the roads and pollutant emissions will be obtained. At the moment the authors are studying a PTA concept called MARGARET which is: Easy to be piloted, sufficiently affordable (i.e., cost equivalent to a medium-high segment car) and capable to assure a safe flight even in bad weather conditions. For landing, parking and maintenance MARGARET will exploit a net of “urban airports” located on urban ring roads near metro-stations and in the countryside near user’s houses. An adequate maintenance system shall be conceived to maximize the availability of MARGARET assuring a better social and market acceptance. Our idea is applying atomized maintenance concept in conjunction with MMU (mobile maintenance units). Atomized maintenance concept allow to strongly increase availability of the aircraft by distributing long and concentrated scheduled maintenance activities on shorter daily maintenance activities. MMU’s will be able to move from the “urban airports” near the city-center to the ones in the countryside (and vice-versa) by employing helicopters or vans. In this way, the MMU’s could perform maintenance activities while the user is at work during the day or in the evening when the user returns home. An on-board fault prognostic system will allow to optimize MMU’s operations.