Operations by new eVTOL aircraft in and around major metropolitan areas will reach an inflection point amounting to thousands of daily movements between 2026 and 2028. That’s the good news, according to German startup D3 Technologies; the bad news, it claims, is that existing air traffic control service providers will not be able to cope with the volume of activity expected from urban air mobility (UAM) and, what’s more, are fundamentally ill-suited to the task.
In its recently published white paper “Air Traffic Control for Urban Air Mobility,” the Munich-based company lays out the case for providing a new integrated approach to air traffic management (ATM) and argues that it is on track to deliver what’s needed. It argues that it will not be sufficient for the emerging passenger-carrying UAM sector to simply adopt technology and processes developed for existing unmanned aircraft system tariff management (UTM).
According to D3, the current lack of a fit-for-purpose structure for managing airspace is one of the key barriers to the successful expansion of UAM, with the others including public acceptance, unresolved ground infrastructure needs, and regulatory issues.
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