Can Urban Air Mobility become reality? Opportunities, challenges and selected research results

TL;DR

This paper reviews the opportunities, challenges, and recent research findings on Urban Air Mobility (UAM), emphasizing technological, economic, and societal aspects to assess its potential for sustainable urban transportation.

Contribution

It provides an overview of key research topics and DLR's contributions to UAM, highlighting recent results supporting its feasibility and integration into urban transport systems.

Findings

UAM has potential to transform urban transportation and economy.

Technological advances are addressing safety, noise, and environmental concerns.

Research supports UAM's viability with ongoing developments in infrastructure and safety.

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a new air transportation system for passengers and cargo in urban environments, enabled by new technologies and integrated into multimodal transportation systems. The vision of UAM comprises the mass use in urban and suburban environments, complementing existing transportation systems and contributing to the decarbonization of the transport sector. Initial attempts to create a market for urban air transportation in the last century failed due to lack of profitability and community acceptance. Technological advances in numerous fields over the past few decades have led to a renewed interest in urban air transportation. UAM is expected to benefit users and to also have a positive impact on the economy by creating new markets and employment opportunities for manufacturing and operation of UAM vehicles and the construction of related ground infrastructure. However, there are also concerns about noise, safety and security, privacy and environmental impacts. Therefore, the UAM system needs to be designed carefully to become safe, affordable, accessible, environmentally friendly, economically viable and thus sustainable. This paper provides an overview of selected key research topics related to UAM and how the German Aerospace Center (DLR) contributed to this research in the project "HorizonUAM - Urban Air Mobility Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR)". Selected research results that support the realization of the UAM vision are briefly presented.