Your AAM Vehicle Is Waiting at The Vertiport. Should You Board?

A systemic risk analysis seeks to discover the potential dangers passengers will face when their vertiport is integrated within an airport setting and proposes a plan to mitigate them.

July 14, 2024 | Kilgore Bass

Illustration of a soon-to-built vertiport by Skyportz Australia

Illustration of a Skyportz (Australia) vertiport. (Copyright CONTRERAS EARL Architecture 2022)

Some day in the foreseeable future, passengers will be waiting in the departure lounge at their nearest vertiport. The announcement will be made to board their flight and they will step out onto the tarmac. But should they? What hazards will they face between the terminal and their eVTOL? That’s what a quartet of researchers sought to predict in their study published in Advances in Human Factors of Transportation, Volume 48, 2024.

Objectivity counts

Elena Stefana, Giulio Di Gravio, and Riccardo Patriarca of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, and Natalia Guskova from the Department of Air Transport, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic selected the Systems Theoretic Accident Modelling and Processes (STAMP) causality model inasmuch as it employs safety as a continuous control task. The STAMP model has nested within it System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) and Causal Analysis based on System Theory (CAST) techniques, all of which help incorporate the human factors into the operations. Doing so enabled Stefana, Di Gravio, Patriarca, and Guskova to gain an unemotional, nonjudgmental perspective on the task before them. The team used the existing EU regulations for AAM operations as the basis for their study.

Something like a nesting doll only with much higher stakes

Each of the operations, equipment, and the surrounding air and ground infrastructure are systems unto themselves, forming systems within systems. The addition of advanced air mobility operations (AAM) into the equation could – and likely will – pose new, unique challenges with potentially dangerous consequences for the personnel operating at the vertiport and the passengers they serve.

(Image copyright and courtesy of AHFE International)

Reducing risk at vertiports

The analysis identified five potential hazards and sub-hazards in future vertiport-airport operations and offered safety recommendations to all who are involved in them including:

Clear definitions of roles and responsibilities for the regulatory authorities
Airport and vertiport operating personnel and the establishment and maintenance of channels to assure coordination between their activities
The eVTOLs themselves, which should maintain trustworthy, timely, and reliable surveillance proficiencies to transmit flight data including emergency status.

The risks are real but if they’re well-managed, so are the rewards

Perhaps as early as 2025 in some locales, perhaps closer to 2028 in others, vertiports will soon be as commonplace in the traveling public’s vernacular as airports are today. But, if eVTOL and vertiport operators want the flying public to climb aboard their newfangled aircraft they must ensure future vertiport operations are as safe as humanly possible. To do that, Stefana, DiGravio, Patriarca, and Guskova provided a blueprint which speeds up the timeline to make that happen.