No abstract

No abstract

While helicopter-based Aerial Taxi Services (ATS) are nothing new, Urban Air Mobility gains traction with the vast amount of new eVTOL concepts announced in the recent past. Dubai has the strategy to make the ATS an integral part of a multimodal mobility with the aspiration to not limit the service to the financially affluent. By conducting an integral approach to define the entire ecosystem and requirements to setup the Aerial Taxi Service, the authors found out that an implementation of a financially viable eVTOL based ATS needs more than just the exchange of legacy helicopters. From the use-case definition across requirements for a dedicated eVTOL infrastructure (vertistructure) and the aircraft’s integration into the airspace, the aircraft is situated within a series of interacting trade-offs. Only by identifying and solving bottlenecks in the overall operation a promising ATS concept can be defined.

No abstract

Several cities and regions have announced to launch electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) based air taxi services in the future. To successfully implement such services, the financial viability must be assessed. As part of the project "SkyCab", an eVTOL based air taxi service concept was designed, associated costs to set-up such service assessed, major impact factors on the pricing identified and the willingness-to-pay of the target customers evaluated. The paper outlines the approach to evaluate the financial viability within five steps. First, the target customer group is identified based on the local mobility demand. Second, route network and vertiport locations are selected meeting the target customer trip demand and providing travel time saving benefits. Third, the willingness-to-pay is estimated: Therefore, the average financial power of the target customer groups is determined, and time and comfort advantages of an air taxi service compared to other means of transportation are evaluated. Fourth, the operational costs under consideration of the entire air taxi ecosystem are identified where pilot, aircraft and overhead costs contribute to 2/3 of the overall operational costs. Last, main operational impact factors such as the utilization rate, occupation rate and level of automation driving the financial viability are evaluated.