Identification of Potential Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Safety Hazards from Helicopter Accident Data – Methodology and Preliminary Results

Safety is paramount for aviation. The development of urban air mobility (UAM) is not excluded from consideration, however, while research generally focuses on technical and operational issues, few have been done regarding safety. It is clear that there are a lot of unknowns regarding either the design or operation of the UAM vehicles, so this research paper proposes to extract as much information as possible from helicopter accidents in urban environments. While no detailed technical information about UAM vehicles and operations is available, helicopters represent an interesting source of data. It is considered that the UAM vehicles with vertical take-off and landing capabilities present similar characteristics to helicopters. Building on a previous report by the authors [1], a set of accident reports from several safety agencies worldwide has been analysed. The reports have been shortlisted according to the relevance of the scenario; selecting those which happened in an urban environment or close to urban areas. Relevant hazards have been identified and assessed by experts in order to understand how they could translate to UAM operations. Identified hazards could serve for risk assessment of future UAM operations as well as for the development of risk mitigation measures or policies.