Analyzing the Barriers of Adopting Air Taxis in Emerging Economy Context: A Decision-Making Framework

In today’s scenario, air taxis are getting lot of traction due to number of potential advantages. Since the concept is relatively new in the market, and there are various challenges along the path to the adoption of air taxis. Therefore, the study first explored the challenges using the scholarly literature and categorized them according to the Technological, Organizational, Environmental, and Human (TOEH) framework. It shows that urban air mobility (UAM) deployment in India faces several challenges, including unclear regulations and infrastructure, unclear business models, and public reluctance due to safety and cost concerns. After identifying the challenges, the study employed the Interpretive Structural Modelling technique to develop a hierarchical framework of the challenges. Further MICMAC analysis was applied to categorize the challenges into autonomous, linkage, independent, and dependent categories. The results show that most barriers fall under the linkage category, and regulatory and legal ambiguity have the highest driving power. The study results add to the existing literature by establishing a structural relationship among the anticipated barriers. Also, the results will help practitioners develop strategies to overcome the challenges with relative ease.