Scaling Advanced Air Mobility: How Vertiport Automation Systems Can Innovate Transportation

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) holds the potential to change the way we move and revolutionize urban and regional transportation. AAM can integrate with existing transportation systems to augment travel to move people and cargo between places not traditionally served by aviation.

One of the keys to achieving efficient and scalable operations is a Vertiport Automation System (VAS). A VAS fills the critical role of managing the operational challenges across one or more vertiports, acting as a central nervous system of a vertiport or vertiport network.

To explore the value of a VAS to networks of vertiports that serve cities and their surrounding regions, WSP, Altaport and BluSky Services, with contributions from other aviation and technology industry leaders, authored a VAS concept of operations (CONOPS) paper that outlines the VAS, its capabilities and its role in our future transportation network.

“A remarkable future is on the horizon, incorporating new aviation services into a cohesive integrated and efficient transportation system,” Paul Wheeler, vice president, aerial innovation, for WSP and an author of the document. “The VAS CONOPS augments current research on vertiport automation and provides a blueprint for managing the anticipated increase in operations, paving the way for the efficient mobility benefits promised in the future.”