Across the international landscape, momentum is building to implement Urban Air Mobility (UAM) as a form of transportation that can unlock a faster and cleaner alternative to long trips in a personal vehicle. Unveiled and excitedly showcased at the 2024 Consumer and Electronics Show (CES), numerous electric Vertical Take-Off & Landing (eVTOL) developers have been competing to be the first to market, and many in the transportation industry are observing with a watchful eye to see when and where these companies will literally and proverbially take off and land.

For the past 15 months, we have been partnering with Supernal, an eVTOL vehicle developer, to advance the thinking around bringing eVTOL to market in cities. As they continue their work on a safe, reliable, and sustainable vehicle, we were excited to align with their vision and support them in calling to action a collaborative discussion about the ground infrastructure needs of this emerging industry. The involvement of industry participants like vertiport developers, cities, and other key stakeholders will be crucial to prepare for the thoughtful and well-integrated use of these vehicles. Supernal’s vision for a scalable, electrified, clean-energy ecosystem that would integrate with existing transit infrastructure can only be realized in conjunction with well-sited vertiports, safe and suitable community plans, and well-appointed city regulations. Focusing on the city integration and the ground transportation side of air mobility, we are helping support their go-to-market vision.

Invited into key work streams by Supernal’s City Activation team, we launched a GIS-based Vertiport Site Suitability Analysis offering an overarching look at how vertiports could be sited in an optimal way for tapping into potential eVTOL demand, while also providing community benefit through thoughtful integration of ground transportation. Using our expertise in harnessing massive and complex datasets, we automated the extraction and analysis of vertiport suitability indicators that could be compared, apples-to-apples, across multiple potential sites. This automation created a tremendous time savings allowing the team to spend more time assessing site suitability than being inundated by data.