Initial Estimation of the Number of Urban Air Mobility Operations at Aerodromes to Assess Operational Limits

Community acceptance and aerodrome throughput are important operational limits for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) that must be addressed to attain widespread use for transportation. This paper presents an approach, leveraging previous work that identifies potential UAM trips based on travel data for a metropolitan area, to estimate, without requiring detailed airspace simulations, the number of operations at aerodromes and inform initial assessments of community acceptance and aerodrome throughput issues. Operators, regulators, and infrastructure planners stand to benefit from more accurate assessments of touchdown and lift-off (TLOF) pad and gate requirements to support high-frequency, ridesharing-enabled UAM services. We develop a continuous, temporal-based throughput model that couples a ridesharing-aware scheduling framework with spatially constrained estimates of TLOF pads and gates at candidate sites for a notional UAM network in the Chicago, IL metropolitan area. By building upon previous research, we estimate a plausible number of TLOF pads and gates across nine different aerodromes. Using these hypothesized facilities, we estimate the effects of aerodrome infrastructure on a possible UAM network. The application of the model reveals notable variability in capacity drivers. Some aerodromes are limited by TLOF pad availability whereas others are limited by gate availability. Although ridesharing can reduce the number of aircraft to meet a specified demand, the potential cost savings from ridesharing can stimulate additional demand that intensifies aerodrome bottlenecks. Preliminary network-level estimates—assuming independent aerodrome operations—suggest that throughput reductions of 63% and 69% (considering different inter-arrival times) are plausible solely due to aerodrome infrastructure limits. Although these figures do not account for inter-aerodrome feedback effects, they establish an early upper-bound that underscores the critical role of ground-side capacity in UAM network viability.