Kamal Acharya

Ph.D. Candidate at UMBC, AI Researcher

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Conference Paper

Urban Air Mobility Flight Demand Modeling for Airports in New York City

2026 AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum DOI: 10.2514/6.2026-1475

Urban Air Mobility Airport Demand Modeling Advanced Air Mobility

DOI Cite

Abstract

This paper develops a data-driven framework for forecasting Urban Air Mobility demand for airport trips in New York City. It combines taxi trip records with socioeconomic and geospatial taxi-zone features, evaluates generalized trip cost across airport-bound origin-destination pairs, and estimates how UAM adoption may change across deployment phases as cost, speed, congestion, and reliability conditions evolve.

Plain-Language Summary

The paper studies when air taxi services could become attractive for trips to JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, especially from congested parts of New York City where travel time reliability matters.

Why This Paper Matters

The paper gives planners a quantitative way to evaluate airport-focused UAM services in a dense, congestion-sensitive metropolitan market.

Research Summary

This paper studies UAM as an airport-access service in one of the most congestion-sensitive metropolitan regions in the United States. The focus is on trips to JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, where ground travel time and reliability can strongly affect traveler choices.

The study combines New York City taxi trip records with socioeconomic and geospatial features to estimate where UAM service could become competitive. Generalized trip cost is used to compare UAM with ground transportation under different deployment stages.

The results are useful for planning questions such as where vertiports should be placed, how services might phase in over time, and which origin zones may produce the highest airport-bound demand.

Key Contributions

  • Models UAM airport-access demand for the New York City region.
  • Uses taxi trip, socioeconomic, and geospatial features to estimate airport-bound demand.
  • Compares generalized trip cost across early, mid, and mature UAM deployment phases.
  • Supports fleet sizing, vertiport siting, pricing, and phased deployment planning.

Publication Details

Type
Conference Paper
Venue
AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum
Year
2026

Authors

Acharya K., Vasiloff K., Wang Z., Song H., Sun L.

Research Topics

Urban Air Mobility Airport Demand Modeling Advanced Air Mobility

Citation

@inproceedings{acharya2026-urban-air-mobility-flight-demand-modeling-for-airports-in-new-york-city,
  title = {Urban Air Mobility Flight Demand Modeling for Airports in New York City},
  author = {Acharya K. and Vasiloff K. and Wang Z. and Song H. and Sun L.},
  booktitle = {AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.2514/6.2026-1475}
}