Future Regional Air Mobility Analysis Using Conventional, Electric, and Autonomous Vehicles

What is it about?

While there is substantial current interest in the promise of Urban Air Mobility using electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (e-VTOL) aircraft concepts and much effort is underway to address challenges of those concepts, for longer regional trips, advanced Conventional Take-Off, and Landing (CTOL) concepts have some inherent performance advantages over VTOL counterparts and these CTOL concepts may face fewer technical, regulatory, and community acceptance challenges. The paper here considers the impacts that electric propulsion technologies, along with increasing levels of autonomy and improved operational capability of the operator applied to small CTOL aircraft may have on regional transportation systems in the United States. The reduction in operating costs that these technologies promise may enable more widespread use of CTOL aircraft (and its all-electric version, eCTOL), as a regular component of transportation.

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