Exploring Vehicle and Fleet Design Spaces for Profitable Urban Air Mobility Operations

Future concepts and fleet allocations for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) depend on system design and analysis to generate expected solutions. Because the market is saturated with vehicle concepts, it is expected that a few will be profitable. Outside of industry efforts, the academic literature has made progress in predicting future concepts for future transportation systems. However, additional research is necessary to predict future UAM concepts using profitability rather than cost. Traditional design and allocation studies leverage cost models to define direct operating costs as a means to estimate the likelihood of successful programs. The traditional approach is useful for established operations (e.g., commercial, business, and general aviation); however, because UAM (or reimagined on-demand mobility via eVTOL) operations are not established, there is an opportunity to expand approaches to look at profitability to ensure the expected solutions address market needs. Because the UAM landscape is constantly changing and the service is rumored to be cost-prohibited, assessing profitability as a means for aircraft design is necessary. This paper provides a system design and analysis approach that focuses on fleet allocation and design tasks under profitability objectives. The paper demonstrates progress with a use-case for the San Francisco Bay Area.