Urban Air Mobility

Urban Air Mobility Market Study

Reiche, Colleen PhD
Goyal, Rohit
Cohen, Adam
Serrao, Jaqueline
Kimmel, Shawn, PhD
Fernando, Chris
Susan Shaheen
2018

The Booz Allen Team explored market size and potential barriers to Urban Air Mobility (UAM) by focusing on three potential markets – Airport Shuttle, Air Taxi, and Air Ambulance. We found that the Airport Shuttle and Air Taxi markets are viable, with a significant total available market value in the U.S. of $500 billion, for a fully unconstrained scenario. In this unconstrained best-case scenario, passengers would have the ability to access and fly a UAM at any time, from any location to any destination, without being hindered by constraints such as weather, infrastructure, or traffic...

The Potential Societal Barriers of Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

Susan Shaheen
Cohen, Adam
Farrar, Emily
2018

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging concept of air transportation where small package delivery drones to passenger-carrying air taxis operate over populated areas, from small towns to the largest cities are being considered. This could revolutionize the way people move within and around cities by shortening commute times, bypassing ground congestion, and enabling point-to-point flights across cities. In recent years, several companies have designed and tested enabling elements of this concept, including; prototypes of Vertical Take-Off Landing (VTOL) capable vehicles, operational...

Mobility on Demand Planning and Implementation: Current Practices, Innovations, and Emerging Mobility Futures

Susan Shaheen
Cohen, Adam
Broader, Jacquelyn
Davis, Richard
Brown, Les
Neelakantan, Radha
Gopalakrishna, Deepak
2020

This report provides Mobility on Demand (MOD) planning and implementation practices and tools to support communities. The report discusses different stakeholders in the MOD ecosystem and the role of partnerships in filling spatial, temporal, and other service gaps. Additionally, the report discusses how MOD can be integrated into transportation planning and modeling. The report also discusses shared mobility implementation considerations, such as rights-of-way management, multimodal integration, data sharing, equity, labor impacts, and the role of pilot evaluations. Finally, the report...

Urban Air Mobility: Opportunities and Obstacles

Cohen, Adam
Susan Shaheen
2021

Urban Air Mobility (UAM, also known as advanced air mobility) is an emerging concept that envisions a safe, sustainable, affordable, and accessible air transportation system for emergency management, cargo delivery, and passenger mobility within or traversing a metropolitan area. While numerous societal concerns have been raised about these approaches (e.g., privacy, safety, security, social equity), on-demand aviation has the potential to provide options for emergency services, goods delivery, and passenger mobility in urban and rural areas using small piloted and autonomous aircraft....

Urban Air Mobility: History, Ecosystem, Market Potential, and Challenges

Cohen, Adam P.
Susan Shaheen
Farrar, Emily M.
2021

Since the early 20th century, inventors have conceptualized “plane cars” and other urban aerial transportation. Emerging innovations in electrification, automation, and other technologies are enabling new opportunities for on-demand air mobility, business models, and aircraft design. Urban air mobility (UAM) envisions a safe, sustainable, affordable, and accessible air transportation system for passenger mobility, goods delivery, and emergency services within or traversing metropolitan areas. This research employed a multi-method approach comprised of 106...

Future of Aviation: Advancing Aerial Mobility through Technology, Sustainability, and On-Demand Flight

Cohen, Adam
Susan Shaheen
2023

Advanced air mobility (AAM) is a broad concept enabling consumers access to air mobility, cargo and package delivery, healthcare applications, and emergency services through an integrated and connected multimodal transportation network. AAM includes local use cases of about a 50-mile radius in rural or urban areas and intraregional use cases of up to approximately 500 miles that occur within or between urban and rural areas. The Future of Aviation Conference: Advancing Aerial Mobility through Technology, Sustainability, and On-Demand Flight was held in person at the San Francisco...

Planning for Advanced Air Mobility

Cohen, Adam
Susan Shaheen
Wulff, Yolanka
2024

Advanced air mobility (AAM) could result in fundamental changes to land use and the built environment and transform how people access essential services (e.g., emergency and medical services), goods, and mobility. While the impacts of these innovations remain to be seen, planners and policymakers need to prepare for these changes to minimize the potential for adverse impacts and maximize the likelihood of sustainable and equitable outcomes.

Advanced Air Mobility: Opportunities, Challenges, and Research needs for the State of California (2023-2030)

Cohen, Adam, MS
Susan Shaheen
2024

Advanced air mobility (AAM) is a broad concept that enables consumers access to air mobility, goods delivery, and emergency services through an integrated and connected multimodal transportation network. AAM can provide short-range urban, suburban, and rural flights of about 50-miles and mid-range regional flights up to a several hundred miles. State law delegates responsibility for oversight in aviation primarily to the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). This white paper presents an overview of the state of the market, such as the aircraft under development and forecast...

Advanced Air Mobility

Cohen, Adam
Susan Shaheen
2025

This entry discusses key terms, emerging infrastructure concepts, and the potential impacts of advanced air mobility (AAM). It then concludes with a discussion of potential challenges and the need for research and policy to guide sustainable and equitable outcomes.

From Patchwork to Network: A Comprehensive Framework for Demand Analysis and Fleet Optimization of Urban Air Mobility

Jiang, Xuan
Zhou, Xuanyu
Zhao, Yibo
Cao, Shangqing
Zhao, Jinhua
Hansen, Mark
Sengupta, Raja
2025

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) presents a transformative vision for metropolitan transportation, but its practical implementation is hindered by substantial infrastructure costs and operational complexities. We address these challenges by modeling a UAM network that leverages existing regional airports and operates with an optimized, heterogeneous fleet of aircraft. We introduce LPSim, a Large-Scale Parallel Simulation framework that utilizes multi-GPU computing to co-optimize UAM demand, fleet operations, and ground transportation interactions simultaneously. Our equilibrium search algorithm is...