Advanced Air Mobility or AAM is a rapidly growing new sector of the aerospace industry that merges traditional and non-traditional aviation participants with new and innovative technologies that will revolutionize how we transport people, products, and services by air.

Elements of AAM will engage on-demand, highly automated and eventually “self-piloted” (autonomous) aircraft to transport paying passengers or cargo within urban and rural areas. AAM will be a safe, secure, and efficient aviation transportation system that will connect our society like never before.

The AAM vision comprises an ecosystem that encompasses infrastructure, eVTOL and eSTOL aircraft, advanced UAS Traffic Management (UTM) inspired systems, the community where operations will be conducted, and the flying public using these services.

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) concepts includes Urban Air Mobility or UAM (commercial intra-city) that include Air Metro and Air Taxi, but also includes cargo and last mile package delivery within urban areas. Additional use cases include commercial inter-city transportation or Regional Air Mobility (RAM) operations as well as public service applications such as air ambulance, law enforcement, firefighting, and search & rescue.

Additional applications involve humanitarian, incident response and military use cases. AAM technology is also being applied to private and recreational use cases.

Community acceptance of novel AAM use cases requires a paradigm shift in how society thinks of aviation and the role it plays in daily life. For example, a longstanding convention is that flying a plane is a complex skill that requires rigorous training and is very expensive to obtain. This has been a barrier to entry for those without the personal wealth to afford expensive flight training.

Another traditional notion is that aviation is often perceived as unreliable, too expensive and too noisy for routine personal transport of passengers or goods. Innovative solutions in electric propulsion systems and flight control automation have resulted in more economical, environmentally sustainable, and quieter aircraft than those of traditional aviation.

Current awareness of these innovations is low among the non-flying public as well as local, state, and municipal leaders who are not engaged with initial adopter communities. To advance AAM to higher maturity levels as described in more complex use cases such as Urban Air Mobility (UAM) or Regional Air Mobility (RAM) will require a buildup of community stakeholders who understand the complexities of AAM.

All Azimuth Solutions, with our team of AAM expert consultants, can help provide key insights into the challenges faced across the ecosystem.

Two independent foundational AAM market studies chartered by NASA were conducted by Booze Allen Hamilton (BAH) and Crown-McKenzie (CM), with the results published in the fall of 2018. Both studies identify potential markets that include Air Metro, Air Taxi, Last Mile Package Delivery, Airport Shuttle and Air Ambulance.

The BAH study identified Airport Shuttle and Air Taxi markets as viable markets with a significant total available market value on the low end at $200B with $500B at the market entry price points by 2030 in the best-case, unconstrained scenario. To add perspective, the current GDP of the United States commercial airline industry is approximately $189B a year or 1.2% of the total annual GDP.

In an Economic Impact of Civil Aviation Study Significant legal/regulatory, certification, public perception, infrastructure, and weather constraints exist, all of which reduce market potential in the near term for AAM. Even with these considerations taken into account, and applying operational constraints/barriers, 0.5% of the total available market worth $2.5B can be captured in the near term. This near term figure was exceeded with the amount of capital investment flowing into this nascent sector of the aerospace industry at nearly 2.5 billion as of September 2019. More recent (2021) Morgan Stanley Research is forecasting UAM to become a $1 Trillion market sector by 2040 .