FutureFlight On The Radar
New Index Identifies Likely Early Leaders in Race To Provide Advanced Air Mobility Ground Infrastructure
SMG Consulting is taking an objective look at prospects for establishing vertiports and other facilities, and the group says there is a lot more work to do.

A whispered ghostly voice saying “if you build it they will come” was all it took to persuade Kevin Costner’s lead character in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams to make a baseball park appear in an Iowa cornfield. This seems to be the message that multiple advanced air mobility (AAM) pioneers are channeling in their quest to establish the vertiports and other infrastructure needed to get eVTOL air taxi operations up and running.

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma/opportunity. Can large investments be justified for an as-yet highly speculative new transportation mode? And can the infrastructure get built, with the full cooperation of all stakeholders, in time to meet the promises some eVTOL aircraft developers are making to their backers about revenues flowing by 2024?