Cedric Justin is a research faculty at the Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering. Justin’s research focuses on the modeling of new electrified Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) concepts of operations, and on the analysis of their economic viability and environmental sustainability. He says, “I am excited to see these new vehicle designs being proposed for future air mobility services. I view urban and regional air mobility as necessary evolution of transportation once society embraces teleworking and former commuters live further away from traditional city-centers.” Furthermore, Justin believes there is a need to take a system-of-system mindset to assess not only how these new transportation concepts will be competing and interacting with other transportation modes, but also to investigate how sustainable these operations will be.
In collaboration with NASA, Justin investigated airport charging infrastructure requirements when transitioning a fleet of fossil-fuel powered commuter aircraft to electric propulsion and devised optimal charging strategies to reduce the energy costs and mitigate the impact on the electric grid. “Up to 61% reduction in peak-power draw and up to 25% reduction in electricity costs are possible while preserving routing and schedule integrity,” he explains. Justin developed a US-wide regional air mobility demand modeling framework and a fleet routing and schedule optimization environment for the transportation of passengers aboard small aircraft over short distances
. “For operations within the U.S. northeast corridor, the transition to an electrified fleet allows serving twice the number of communities currently served, while reducing the carbon emissions per passenger by fifty percent.”
He is currently involved in the AIAA Air Transportation System technical committee and the AIAA Transformational Flight System Outreach committee. He was also part of the Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) team looking into how to prepare airports for electric aircraft.
