Urban Air Mobility: A State of Art Analysis

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an aerial component of urban mobility system which integrates an emerging transport mode, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), also known as drones, into multimodal urban mobility context. UAM has potential to bring new services related to both passengers and logistic/freight mobility (like passenger carrying air taxis or small package delivery drones) as well as enable better resilience in emergency situations resulting due to various causes (for example, traffic accidents, traffic congestion, catastrophic events and others). Such new services, accelerated thanks to the recent introduction of Vertical Take-Off Landing (VTOL) capable vehicles, able to need less air space to take-off or landing, have the possibility to transform the way people move within, around and between urban areas by shortening commute times, bypassing ground mobility congestion and enabling specific and oriented point-to-point flight across the cities. As currently the UAM integrations are still hindered by a number of constraints, in this paper we provide an overview of UAM legislative frameworks, with particular focus on European Union (EU), together with the overview of the most relevant UAM case studies and the potential new UAM services.