I’m incredibly excited to share that our research paper, “Operational Air Taxi Flight Routes in a Metropolitan Region,” has been officially published by AIAA ahead of the 2025 Aviation Forum in Las Vegas!
The study focuses on mapping and evaluating four near-term flight routes for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft operating between UC Berkeley and NASA Ames. These routes are based on existing general aviation flyways and FAA-sanctioned VFR transition corridors in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most congested and airspace-constrained regions in the country.
Rather than designing hypothetical airspace frameworks, we grounded our approach in over 60,000 ADS-B traffic observations to quantify route congestion using three metrics: aircraft density, average dwell time, and traffic diversity. Each candidate route was scored using a weighted index to assess its feasibility for early-stage UAM operations.
This work was done in collaboration with UC Berkeley, Crown Consulting, NASA Ames, and the Berkeley Space Center. I’m grateful to have worked with Jordan Kam, Vishwanath Bulusu, Profs. Alexandre Bayen and Raja Sengupta, and others who provided regulatory and operational insights.
The paper will be presented at the AIAA Aviation Forum 2025 in Las Vegas. It can be accessed here: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2025-3240.
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Read more about this research: Mapping eVTOL Flight Between NASA Ames and UC Berkeley and Presenting at an AIAA Conference.
