Developing Sustainable Urban Air Mobility Infrastructure that is Efficient, Safe and Regulatory Compliant

This paper examines the historical relationship between existing standards, codes, and best practices as it correlates to successful as well as unsuccessful low altitude aviation infrastructure, e.g. heliports for helicopters. This historical relationship is then examined as to how it may apply to the development of future standards and practices for infrastructure in support of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and Urban Air Mobility (UAM). There is a welldocumented and strong correlation between correctly designed helicopter infrastructure as it pertains to safety and sustainability with several valuable lessons learned that can be directly applied to this new transportation model. However, there are also areas of interest such as terminology, compliance requirements, oversight, data integrity, forms and records, ordinances, survey criteria, airspace protection, and federal funding, to name a few, where there are obvious opportunity for improvement going forward. This paper seeks to highlight many of the key lessons learned from the past as well as opportunities for improvement in preparing for the future.