Breaking Down FAA’s Blueprint To Get Air Taxis off the Ground

The commercialization of air taxis and other advanced air mobility (AAM) services just moved one step closer to reality.

The FAA on Wednesday released a new blueprint charting the future of the national airspace system (NAS) integration, focusing heavily on how air taxis and other technologies can operate in urban areas.

Version 2.0 of the FAA’s Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Concept of Operations (ConOps), an update to the original 2020 document, brought together FAA and NASA industry partners to provide an industry roadmap for emerging aviation systems. It describes a “crawl-then-walk” approach to enable increasingly more frequent and complex operations via UAM “corridors” akin to highways in the sky.

While the blueprint won’t hold any legal weight, it will serve as a framework for policymakers moving forward.