Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is the next generation of air transportation that includes new entrants such as electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, increasingly autonomous flight operations, and small UAS package delivery. With these new vehicles and operational concepts comes a desire to increase densities far beyond what occurs today in and around urban areas, to utilize new battery technology, and to move toward more autonomously-piloted aircraft. To achieve these goals, it becomes essential to introduce new safety management system capabilities that can rapidly assess risk as it evolves across a span of complex hazards and, if necessary, mitigate risk by executing appropriate contingencies via supervised or automated decision-making during flights. Recently, reinforcement learning has shown promise for real-time decision making across a wide variety of applications including contingency management. In this work, we formulate the contingency management problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and integrate the contingency management MDP into the AAM-Gym simulation framework. This enables rapid prototyping of reinforcement learning algorithms and evaluation of existing systems, thus providing a community benchmark for future algorithm development. We report baseline statistical information for the environment and provide example performance metrics.

U.S. Department of Defense and United Airlines conduct study and find the risk of exposure to coronavirus on commercial airlines is'virtually nonexistent'; Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas reports. We're not sure this pilot should be flying with such an incurable case of Pac-Man fever. A pilot flying over the Lincolnshire, England, paid homage to one of their favorite arcade games on Sunday by drawing Pac-Man -- complete with one of Pac-Man's nemesis ghosts -- with their flight path. The flight, which took off from Retford Gamston Airport (EGNE) in Nottingham at 11:35 a.m., lasted about an hour and a half. The flight, which took off from Retford Gamston Airport (EGNE) in Nottingham at 11:35 a.m., lasted about an hour and a half, according to FlightRadar24.