Urban Air Mobility Vehicle Dataset

<p>A wide array of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles are in various stages of development. The addition of these vehicles to the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) market would provide more options for short to medium distance aerial transportation, filling the niche that is currently occupied by helicopters. However, the costs and benefits of adopting these vehicles are reliant on many different factors related to both the aircraft and its operating environment.This paper compares 13 UAM vehicles (12 emerging eVTOL vehicles and one helicopter) using a Direct Operating Cost (DOC) model developed by the authors. With the computed DOC values for each vehicle, a computational framework determines, from a set of known passenger trips in the Chicago Metropolitan Area, the number of passenger trips that would use UAM as part of the total trip. These assessments use a specific network of aerodromes in the ChicagoMetropolitan Area using existing sites that could support UAM aircraft operations. From the results, we infer important vehicle characteristics and preferable vehicle configurations for the specific aerodrome network that lead to the highest number of passenger trips utilizing UAM.</p>