The Surprising Key to UAM Success Revealed

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) promises to revolutionize transportation by providing faster and more convenient local travel options for passengers. At the heart of UAM are vertiports, which are designated areas for takeoff, landing, and servicing of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. However, the success of vertiports and UAM as a whole is contingent on site selection. The key to their prosperity is in the old real estate adage: location, location, location. Urban and regional planners, politicians, vertiport developers, and eVTOL operators who ignore this should expect disappointment.

The primary objective of UAM is to save passengers time and frustration. If it doesn't accomplish this, it is doomed to fail no matter how much hype surrounds it. As such, vertiports must be located as close as possible to where they will be most useful. This includes central business districts, office parks, airports, transportation hubs, tourist areas, entertainment districts, healthcare facilities, and residential neighborhoods where UAM passengers reside or are lodging. The value of UAM to consumers decreases exponentially with time and distance to and from a vertiport. A vertiport located just blocks or mere steps away from a desired point is significantly more convenient than one located 20 minutes away.

Location matters far more than the facility's capacity. Operators may focus on aircraft movements, which mean everything to them and their investors because it means they're getting paid, but a facility able to support dozens or even hundreds of operations per hour loses everyone money if nobody actually uses it. Ciudad Real Central Airport, Spain's €1.1 billion private international airport built to serve Madrid and relieve Barajas, failed spectacularly just three or four years after opening to much hype and fanfare owing chiefly to its inconvenient location. Barely anyone came and the operators left. It is baffling that someone managed to convince a group of intelligent people that it was a good idea to build an expensive airport two hours away from the city it was meant to serve.

Of course, Ryanair, Wizz Air, and other ultra-low-cost carriers have managed to thrive by operating at secondary airports that are not as far away from the cities they serve as Ciudad Real Central is to Madrid, but these airlines and secondary airports cater to an entirely different type of passenger than UAM does, especially in its initial stages. Eventually, there will be ultra-low-fare UAM carriers that will spring up as the industry scales and technological advancements reduce operating costs, but for now, let's focus on launching UAM successfully with passengers who can afford the convenience it offers when service first starts.

There have been recent major announcements about UAM services beginning regular flights in the next couple of years. Some will thrive because they will operate at vertiports in just the right locations nearer to where passengers are and where they are going. Others, rushing to launch their services to quell investor dissatisfaction with their pace, have either ignored or outright rejected the most basic tenets of location theory and will inevitably suffer the consequences. They have selected far from optimal sites from which they can begin service quickly but are about as inconvenient to passengers as is Ciudad Real Central for Madrid. Their failure could harm the entire industry.

For this revolution in urban transport to take off and achieve its goals, we must reject the "build it and they will come" mentality and embrace time-proven principles of proper site selection, especially at this critical stage in the development of the industry.