Evaluating the Interoperability of Urban Air Mobility Systems and Airports

This paper investigates how existing arrival and departure procedures can be directly used or adapted to enable high-volume instrument and visual urban air mobility (UAM) flight operations at major airports in the United States. Viable procedures are restricted to those that enable simultaneous and non-interfering UAM flights with conventional aircraft operations. Air traffic controller workload is proposed as the critical integration barrier to scale UAM operations in visual conditions whereas separation minima, especially for approach procedures, is proposed as the critical barrier in instrument conditions. A systems approach is taken to evaluate potential integration strategies for UAM in which the location of UAM runways or vertipads and flight procedures are presented in a topological framework. The benefits, challenges, and notional application of five integration schemes are discussed. Four promising procedures for UAM are introduced through case studies at three airports. Findings indicate that multiple procedures exist to support high-volume UAM integration at major airports under current regulations with additional controller staffing, especially if UAM aircraft exhibit helicopter-like performance.