CANSO Airspace Asia Pacific, in December 2025, brought together industry leaders, regulators, and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) to explore practical approaches to delivering safe, seamless, and harmonized future skies. SkyGrid joined a panel on what it takes to move Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) from concept to reality, covering deployment plans, regulatory progress, infrastructure innovation, and lessons from pilot projects. The conversation centered on how the Asia Pacific region can lead the safe and efficient scale-up of AAM operations while building globally interoperable systems.
Critical Enablers for Sustained Operations
Most investments in the AAM industry are going into aircraft development, leaving behind the airspace infrastructure, data systems, and frameworks needed to actually fly and integrate these new entrants. Enhancements to traffic management approaches need to happen now, so the system is ready when the aircraft are.
Low-altitude surveillance is one significant gap. Radar coverage at these altitudes has historically been poor, and ADS-B presents vulnerabilities, including GPS spoofing and unreliable signals for tactical deconfliction and detect-and-avoid capabilities. Ground-Based Traffic Surveillance (GBTS) would address this by providing high-fidelity situational data to support greater levels of autonomy, while also correlating with ADS-B to preserve the benefits of both. This mirrors what Air Traffic Management (ATM) is already doing at higher altitudes.
SkyGrid and Eve Air Mobility released a joint white paper at the event, “Enabling Advanced Air Mobility – Automated Traffic Management Services for Low-Altitude Operations,” which explores these challenges to integrating highly automated eVTOLs and other new aircraft into low-altitude airspace in detail. The paper also provides a roadmap for airspace integration and automation, setting the stage for the future of digital aviation.
Beyond infrastructure, the AAM ecosystem also needs to build social confidence from the start. EVTOLs and supporting systems must be certified, and the broader ecosystem of physical infrastructure, digital networks, and centralized control systems must demonstrate safe and reliable operations before the public will adopt them. That can only happen if these systems are developed in tandem.
Earning Public Trust Through Safety and Innovation
Bringing new types of aircraft into the airspace requires coordination between regulators, innovators, and infrastructure providers. Legislation takes time, and the goal is to keep safety moving forward within that process. Therefore, a phased approach makes sense, starting in scenic or less-populated areas, progressing to scheduled services, and eventually reaching on-demand air-taxi operations. Each phase builds the data foundation and operational confidence needed to move to the next.
For the public to embrace these technologies, the benefits have to be tangible. The airspace needs to be structured to enable on-time operations and demonstrate the time savings that eVTOLs are designed to deliver. Early users need to know the system is reliable, which means operators and ANSPs must work from a common operating picture to approve and execute flights efficiently.
If a 10-minute eVTOL flight requires 20 minutes of approvals, the passenger experience becomes a 30-minute journey, and early adopters will write the technology off as unreliable. Sandbox testing environments and phased rollouts of core functions are practical steps toward fixing that.
Helicopter operations offer a practical proving ground in the near term. Deploying ATM systems through heliports and helicopter fleet operations builds the foundation that eVTOL integration will later rely on, particularly where turnaround times are short and landing infrastructure coordination is critical. Air traffic flow management concepts from traditional aviation can be adapted first for helicopter operations in urban environments, then carried forward into future eVTOL operations.
Establishing Operations in the Asia Pacific Region
Asia Pacific is shaping up to be a significant market for AAM. Eve’s 2025 Global Market Outlook predicts just over 12,000 eVTOLs in the region by 2045, accounting for 41% of the global market share. The region’s large cities present a strong use case, getting people around faster and more directly, but they are also where operational challenges around scale and aircraft diversity will surface first. That makes Asia Pacific a natural place to develop and refine approaches that other regions can then eventually follow.
Scaling globally will require international alignment, particularly around Automated Flight Rules (AFR). Interoperability challenges that exist today under VFR and IFR will only grow more complex under AFR, which makes common standards and data-sharing frameworks essential. With no pilot on board, automation and data are the backbone of how these systems function. The industry needs digital infrastructure that supports that seamlessly, along with airspace management capable of handling the mix of helicopters, traditional aircraft, drones, and eVTOLs that will share low-altitude airspace.