Operational Air Taxi Flight Routes in a Metropolitan Region

Aviation technology advances in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) will bring new aircraft to the National Airspace System (NAS) and with it near-term operational barriers: traffic density, Class B/C overlap, and pilot-controller workload. This article presents the design and evaluation of four operational air taxi flight routes for manned flight of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in the San Francisco Bay Area network (SF network). In the SF network, where many complex, congested, and controlled airspaces restrict flight, pilot-selected operational flight routes utilizing legacy General Aviation (GA) flyways and transition routes would allow these aircraft to operate near-term. This article also presents direction-specific flight mission profiles between vertiports located at the Richmond Field Station (RFS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Space Center at NASA Ames Research Center. Lastly, using Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) flight data, a feasibility study on congestion of the routes is presented from aircraft in the SF network. This feasibility study observes flight density, dwell time duration, and number of unique aircraft. As eVTOLs hit the market in the coming years, operational flight routes could allow near-term integration and operation in congested airspaces. The methodology is readily extensible to other megaregions and validated with over 60 thousand ADS-B points.