A New Mobility Era: Stakeholders’ Insights regarding Urban Air Mobility

Annitsa Koumoutsidi,Ioanna Pagoni,Amalia Polydoropoulou

doi:10.3390/su14053128

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) constitutes a future aerial mobility alternative, which concerns the use of electric and autonomous aerial vehicles for transporting people throughout a planned network of vertiports. To materialize UAM, several actors of the air and urban transport ecosystem play a vital role. This paper describes the insights gathered from 32 key stakeholders around the world to present and frame the key aspects for the future implementation of UAM. The participants include representatives from the UAM industry such as airports, airlines, aviation consulting companies, academia, and authorities. The data collection encompasses various key research areas, covering topics such as UAM strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks, requirements for implementation, concept integration in the existing transport system, specific use cases, business models, and end-user segments. The research aims at setting up the stakeholder scene and expanding the current literature for UAM by engaging key decision makers and experts towards shaping the new mobility era. The results demonstrate that ensuring certification standards for UAM fleets and updating the current legal and regulatory framework are the main prerequisites for UAM’s realization. In addition, the usage of UAM for transporting cargo or for air ambulance services are the most mature business models for the coming decade.

Highlights

The concept was extended by NASA using the broader term of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) to further consider operations that are not limited to urban areas and include rural and inter-urban trips [2,3] and can address the issue of limited accessibility to remote areas
This paper presents the critical aspects for the future implementation of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) by collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing input provided by 32 key stakeholders around the world
Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through online surveys in two phases engaging two different expert pools consisting of 32 stakeholders in total

Summary

Introduction

The concept was extended by NASA using the broader term of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) to further consider operations that are not limited to urban areas and include rural and inter-urban trips [2,3] and can address the issue of limited accessibility to remote areas. In accordance with the above, a fundamental step towards the successful design and implementation of UAM involves the engagement of multiple players/decision makers with diverse backgrounds and from different markets In this way, their viewpoints on the key aspects of the concept, such as challenges, opportunities, risks, etc., can be acquired. Few studies have been conducted to investigate the challenges of UAM in terms of the legal framework and relevant perspective [10,41], including passenger safety [42], required infrastructure for eVToLs [11], and environmental footprint [14]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion