The Integral Approach to Define the Ecosystem for the Aerial Taxi Service in Dubai

While helicopter-based Aerial Taxi Services (ATS) are nothing new, Urban Air Mobility gains traction with the vast amount of new eVTOL concepts announced in the recent past. Dubai has the strategy to make the ATS an integral part of a multimodal mobility with the aspiration to not limit the service to the financially affluent. By conducting an integral approach to define the entire ecosystem and requirements to setup the Aerial Taxi Service, the authors found out that an implementation of a financially viable eVTOL based ATS needs more than just the exchange of legacy helicopters. From the use-case definition across requirements for a dedicated eVTOL infrastructure (vertistructure) and the aircraft’s integration into the airspace, the aircraft is situated within a series of interacting trade-offs. Only by identifying and solving bottlenecks in the overall operation a promising ATS concept can be defined.