People are meant to be connected to each other. To experience new places. To gather and be brought together. But in 2024, only 52% of the U.S. population flew commercially, according to a survey summary by Airlines for America. In 2023, 4.4 billion passengers were carried by the world’s airlines—1.8 billion international and 2.6 billion domestic—highlighting both the scale of global aviation and the vast number of people who still remain grounded.
Autonomous flight offers numerous advantages in enhancing operational efficiency and stimulating the economy. Most importantly, these benefits will facilitate greater access to flight and improve regional and global connectivity. Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) aims to make flying more affordable and accessible to rural and underserved areas, making travel more convenient. Instead of driving across a city during rush hour, you can opt for a brief air taxi ride. If you live in Austin and your family resides in Dallas or Houston, rather than spending hours driving both ways to visit them, you can now see them for an evening by taking a short trip each way in an eVTOL.
The current air traffic system cannot accommodate high-density operations in low-altitude urban environments. To achieve this future airspace, AAM and autonomous flight necessitate the aviation industry modernizing the National Airspace System (NAS). This modernization will enable a larger scale of operations that are of higher quality, safer, more efficient, and will reduce human error through the incorporation of autonomy.
Safety Improvements
Unlike human operators and controllers, autonomous systems do not experience fatigue, can operate 24/7, and have quicker response times than humans. They adhere to airspace regulations without deviation and can tactically deconflict in real-time.
Autonomy also enables enhanced, high-fidelity coverage of the operational area by integrating a greater variety of sensors capable of processing far more data than a human team could manage. This includes environmental data such as micro-weather conditions, as well as real-time updates to obstacles and hazards. Today, many obstacle datasets are refreshed only once every 28 days through the AIRAC cycle. With current and emerging technology, these updates could become continuous and dynamic, offering up-to-the-minute awareness of changing conditions.
By processing this data at scale, autonomous systems can anticipate risks earlier, enabling faster, more effective responses, or even preventing emergencies altogether.
Operational Efficiency
Air traffic control (ATC) is already overloaded with the current air traffic system, and there aren’t enough controllers to increase the number of flights without adding extra strain to the system. As of the beginning of this year, over 90% of U.S. control towers were understaffed, and there were only 10,800 certified controllers filling over 14,000 positions.
SkyGrid acts as a Third-Party Service Provider (TSP) with innovative technology that integrates safety critical autonomous and cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, supporting high-density AAM operations. Autonomy allows these new aircraft and ground-based systems to analyze a multitude of data sources, run them through advanced algorithms, and provide outputs and patterns that can be leveraged to improve rerouting and predictive behavior. This means shorter wait times at airports, proactivity with aircraft maintenance, and maximum use of an aircraft fleet.
Autonomy will continuously optimize all aspects of AAM flights to enhance efficiency, ensuring that the least amount of fuel necessary is used for each flight. Additionally, new electric aircraft like eVTOLs will reduce the need for fossil fuel-powered vehicles, thereby decreasing the carbon footprint and urban pollution, which contributes to a more sustainable future.
Accessibility and Economic Growth
This new sector of aviation will lead to economic development by creating new jobs, stimulating innovation, and attracting investment. New roles like remote pilots, operations managers, and vertiport managers will be created, and the need for roles related to system administration, IT, and cybersecurity will increase.
Job growth will focus on functionality and enhancing the passenger experience. As automation takes over both routine and taxing tasks, it opens room for humans to do what they do best—connect and create meaningful experiences.
Remote and rural regions will become more accessible as these areas are opened to air transport. Enabling new urban development patterns and optimizing land use will enhance urban planning. Reduced flight costs mean people who couldn’t previously afford flying may get to experience it now.
Scalability Through Autonomy
Autonomy is essential for scaling high-tempo, low-altitude AAM operations. It allows systems to handle large amounts of data needed to create safe flight routes and enable increasingly automated decision-making in dynamic airspace environments. SkyGrid takes a safety-first approach to its autonomy development, trying to bring as many enhancements to users as possible so that the public experiences the advantages of AAM.
All of our services will incorporate an aspect of autonomy at some point, and while safety-critical services will be slower to adapt to AI, the different development phases for our services allow us to prioritize safety within autonomy. AI and autonomy can’t be applied directly to a problem, so we apply them indirectly through our services. Our system aims to eventually automate routine tasks to reduce the workload of people in the loop, like air traffic controllers, and make human operators’ jobs as easy and smooth as possible.
As autonomy evolves, our system will integrate with both cooperative and non-cooperative traffic, further easing the burden on ATC. The industry is also collaborating to create more advanced radar systems and protocols that will enhance aircraft monitoring and surveillance tracking. Solutions for microweather—highly localized weather conditions observed in a small area of 1km or less, a critical aspect for AAM flights—will continue to advance through new sensors, algorithms, and processing methods.
