Jean-Marc Frayret, Polytechnique Montréal, SDG Institute of Advanced Air Mobility
For over a century, aviation has connected distant cities and continents. Today, a new chapter in flight is emerging—not at high altitude, but within, above and between our cities and regions. This transformation is known as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). It represents a future where small electric aircraft and drones will transport people, goods, and services across urban and regional areas, offering faster, cleaner, and more flexible mobility options. Yet, for AAM to move from vision to reality, it must overcome several critical challenges. Ground infrastructure, concepts of operations, and viable business models must all adapt to complex constraints, including existing transport systems, safety and security requirements, regulatory frameworks, urban planning considerations, evolving markets, and, crucially, public acceptance.
Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) refers to the safe, efficient, and sustainable use of the airspace at low altitudes (typically below 5,000 feet) to move passengers, cargo, and provide public services. It includes two major technological families:
AAM extends beyond traditional aviation. It is not confined to major airports or long-distance travel corridors. Instead, it envisions a distributed, interconnected network of aerial services woven directly into daily life—linking hospitals, business districts, suburban communities, industrial zones, and even remote regions. AAM also opens the door to entirely new applications and service models, such as drone-based medical deliveries, precision agriculture, building inspection and maintenance, emergency response, wildfire suppression, and on-demand passenger transport. In essence, AAM represents the emergence of aviation as a local and service-oriented mobility system, designed to operate at the scale of cities and regions rather than continents.
Several global challenges and innovations are converging to make AAM possible:
| Driver | Impact on AAM |
|---|---|
| Climate and Sustainability | Electric propulsion reduces emissions and advanced propeller design reduce noise compared to conventional aviation |
| Urban Congestion | Cities struggle with traffic; aerial mobility offers alternative routes above ground constraints |
| Battery & Electric Technology | Advances in energy storage enable practical short-range electric flight |
| Automation & Digitalization | Autonomous control, sensors, and artificial intelligence make complex air operations feasible |
International investment in AAM is being driven by strong government commitment and a more strategic phase of industry funding. In the United States, federal agencies such as the FAA and NASA are actively supporting the integration of drones and eVTOL aircraft into the national airspace, focusing on safety, certification, and operational frameworks. In Europe, countries like the United Kingdom and institutions such as the European Union are financing large-scale demonstration programs to advance U-space, digital air traffic systems, and urban mobility trials.
Across Asia, South Korea is implementing its national K-UAM roadmap through full-scale flight-testing campaigns, while Japan is positioning AAM for early public deployment with planned operations at Expo 2025 in Osaka. Similarly, the United Arab Emirates has positioned itself as a global frontrunner in AAM, investing heavily in regulatory frameworks, urban vertiport infrastructure, and pilot programs to enable commercial air taxi and drone services as early as the mid-2020s.
Canada is aligning with this global momentum through Transport Canada's regulatory initiatives, national AAM roadmaps, and a growing network of industry- and university-led initiatives aimed at enabling safe adoption and societal integration of AAM. On the industry side, private investment has matured into a more selective, stage-based approach. Capital is now concentrating on companies that are progressing toward vehicle certification, infrastructure development, and manufacturing readiness, rather than early-stage prototypes. This combination of targeted public policy and disciplined industry funding reflects a global shift: AAM is moving from visionary concept to operational readiness.
Canada is emerging as an important player in this field. Montréal, with its strong aerospace heritage and leadership in research and innovation, is becoming a testbed for integrating AAM into real urban and regional environments. Researchers, municipalities, and industry partners are working together to explore how eVTOLs and drone services could support emergency medical logistics, access to remote northern regions, intermodal mobility between airports and city centers, and develop innovative drone applications.
The YMX Innovation Center, located within the international cargo hub of Mirabel, Québec, aims to serve as a real-world testing environment for the safe and seamless integration of AAM into commercial airspace. This testing environment will provide unique opportunities to study AAM not only as a technology, but as a societal system that involves infrastructure, regulation, economics, public acceptance, and environmental impact.
It is essential to recognize that AAM is not solely about designing new aircraft or propulsion technologies. Its success depends on building a complete ecosystem of interconnected socio-technical systems, one that brings together manufacturers, operators, regulators, infrastructure developers, digital service providers, emergency services, municipalities, and community stakeholders.
This ecosystem must be capable of managing safe and efficient operations, ensuring ground and air infrastructure readiness, maintaining public safety and trust, and fostering a diverse base of users and services. In other words, AAM is as much a societal and institutional challenge as it is a technological one.
Vertiports are a new type of ground infrastructure where vehicles take off, land, recharge, and board passengers or cargo. Vertiports can range from high-tech urban mobility hubs to simple landing pads in remote areas. Their classification depends on location, purpose (passenger vs. cargo), and level of infrastructure. AAM deployment will likely require a network of different vertiport types, much like today's mix of airports, heliports, and logistics terminals.
This ecosystem will also depend on a new generation of air traffic management tailored to low-altitude operations, commonly known as UTM (Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management). Unlike traditional ATM, which governs high-altitude commercial aviation, UTM consists of digital, automated systems designed to coordinate both piloted and autonomous aircraft operating at low altitudes. These platforms will manage flight planning, airspace authorization, conflict detection, and real-time communication among vehicles, infrastructure, and regulators, ensuring safe, efficient, and scalable integration of drones and eVTOLs into everyday airspace.
Furthermore, AAM introduces new challenges beyond engineering, particularly in relation to societal integration. Successful adoption will depend on addressing key concerns:
| Challenge | Importance |
|---|---|
| Safety and Reliability | Ensuring vehicles and systems can withstand failures, weather, or cyber risks. |
| Noise Impact | eVTOLs are quieter than helicopters, but frequent operations may affect communities. |
| Weather Resilience | Canadian conditions such as snow, wind, and icing demand robust testing |
| Public Acceptance | Citizens must perceive AAM as beneficial, fair, and safe, not disruptive or elitist. |
Solving these issues require collaboration between engineers, governments, social scientists, and local communities. AAM is not merely a technological revolution; it is a societal transformation.
Our research initiative aims to develop advanced decision-support systems and conduct applied research to guide the successful integration of AAM in Canadian urban, suburban, and remote environments. The work focuses on four strategic objectives:
Beyond these four pillars, this program also aims to advance Digital Twin (DT) capabilities specifically adapted to the AAM ecosystem, enabling real-time simulation, planning, and policy testing. A Digital Twin is a virtual replica of a physical system that continuously receives data to simulate, predict, and optimize real-world performance. In AAM, DTs can represent individual aircraft, vertiports, or even the entire mobility network of a city.
Unlike traditional simulation models, DTs evolve over time as they interact with live operational data. This enables researchers and operators to test scenarios, such as weather disruptions, emergency landings, or passenger demand peaks, in a safe virtual environment before implementing decisions in the real world. Our research program aims to develop critical DT-enabled functions:
Digital twin technology is central to our Canadian research program, as it enables the integration of engineering, urban planning, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and human factors into one coherent decision-support environment.
Our research program is structured around three lines of research focused on advancing the Canadian AAM ecosystem through DT technologies, smart city integration, and real-world experimentation.
This line of research focuses on developing the foundational DT architecture for the AAM ecosystem. It includes the creation of interconnected DT models for vertiports, air traffic, vehicles, and urban infrastructure. Beyond virtual modelling, it explores real-time data integration, IoT connectivity, and process automation using advanced technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts. It also develops DT-enabled decision-support tools to manage mission planning, fleet coordination, and operational control of emergency and delivery services. In addition, it studies resource optimization at vertiports, including scheduling, pad allocation, battery management, and approach/departure procedures.
This line of research addresses how AAM will be integrated into urban and regional environments. It includes the design and optimization of vertiports and vertiport networks, grounded in demand modelling, urban logistics, noise constraints, social acceptability, and multimodal mobility links. It also explores vertiport models of operations and passenger experience, with attention to weather conditions, Canadian infrastructure realities, and human factors assessed through virtual reality environments. Economic feasibility and business modeling form a core part of this line of research, evaluating operational strategies, market structures, and stakeholder value creation to ensure sustainable and socially acceptable deployment of AAM services.
The third line of research translates research into practice by establishing an integrated physical and digital testbed for AAM. This environment combines simulation platforms with real-world demonstration capabilities at key sites such as Mirabel, enabling testing, validation, and technology transfer of DT components. It will serve as a collaborative platform to trial mission management, vertiport operations, cybersecurity features, and new service scenarios under realistic conditions, bridging research, industry innovation, and regulatory experimentation.
In Canada, our research team is based in Montréal and supported by national and industrial partners, including:
Canada offers a uniquely rich environment for studying and deploying AAM, combining real-world complexity with world-class aerospace expertise, making Canada and Montréal an ideal testbed for globally relevant AAM solutions.
Montréal is one of the world's leading aerospace clusters, home to OEMs, suppliers, research centres, and regulatory authorities. Furthermore, Canada's strong regulatory institutions, including Transport Canada, enable proactive collaboration on safety frameworks, certification, and future operational standards.
Advanced Air Mobility aims to address real human challenges: