The Potential of Low-Altitude Airspace: The Future of Urban Air Transportation
Hailong Huang, Jiangcheng Su, Fei–Yue Wang
Abstract
Many megacities, such as London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai, have been born due to urban- ization. While citizens enjoy the convenience of city life, such cities suffer from drawbacks of transportation: the average commute time has been increasing over the past years. With the maturity of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft technology, decision-makers have started to look upward to the low-altitude airspace. This blue space has the potential to reshape the transportation system and shorten the average travel time in daily life. To explore this emerging area, we held a Distributed/Decentralized Hybrid Workshop on Sustain- ability for Transportation and Logistics (DHW-STL), and this letter summarizes the outcomes of our discussion. Here, we first pinpoint the pain issues of conventional transportation. Then, we present the emerging low-altitude airspace transportation option, followed by a discussion on how such a new transportation option can integrate with the conventional ground-based transportation system. Some thoughts about the pathway to further development of the integrated transportation system are shared finally.