The future of flight is taking shape above our cities, promising a new era of on-demand air mobility. Electric air taxis, delivery drones, and autonomous aircraft will transform how we transport people and goods through urban airspace.
But there’s a fundamental problem: our current aviation system wasn’t designed for what’s coming next. To reach the envisioned airspace and scale Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), we need a digital-first mindset. Flight operators and air traffic controllers require digital tools and third-party services that support them through automation, shifting their roles, and managing airspace more effectively.
Why Current Systems Can’t Scale
Traditional aviation operates on a human-centric model where controllers manage aircraft using voice communications, visual cues, and radar. This system has worked safely, but it can’t scale to meet the demands of AAM, which will bring new uncrewed and autonomous aircraft operating at lower altitudes in dense urban areas and at higher frequencies than we see today. At scale, Air Traffic Control (ATC) won’t have the capacity to manage the sky safely.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) calls this the Info-Centric National Airspace System (NAS), a vision to handle increasing operations and aircraft diversity through new technology and improved air traffic services. The industry should leverage cloud-native services, digital twins, and automation to accelerate deployment and reduce reliance on legacy hardware.
New Aircraft, New Challenges
AAM introduces electric, uncrewed, and autonomous aircraft that don’t fit neatly into existing regulatory categories. These new aircraft operate differently from traditional planes and have new limitations:
- Energy Constraints: Electric aircraft have limited battery life, which restricts their ability to deviate from routes, change speed, or handle delays. This makes them highly susceptible to weather and airspace constraints.
- High-Tempo Operations: These aircraft make shorter, more frequent, and more dynamic flights. Ground operations must move at a much higher pace, requiring rapid turnaround times at vertiports.
- Unique Airspace Access: AAM aircraft will access low-altitude airspace that traditional aircraft can’t. These areas usually only see a few helicopters at a time.
- Remote Operations: Without onboard pilots, aircraft need ground-based systems, sensors, and automation to remain situationally aware and perform functions like flight planning, navigation, communication, hazard avoidance, and conflict management.
As operations increase in urban corridors, scaling AAM while minimizing disruptions to existing air traffic becomes a key challenge. Eventually, dedicated corridors can help protect high-throughput operations while keeping the airspace safe.
What Digital-First Actually Means
A digital-first mindset puts digital interactions and data exchange at the center of airspace management. Instead of relying primarily on human judgment and voice communications, automated systems can process vast amounts of information in real-time and connect uncrewed aircraft, flight operators, and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs). A digital-first approach requires:
- Automated, Data-Driven Systems: For real-time flight monitoring, route optimization, deconfliction, and system-wide coordination, these systems provide the support humans need to manage increased complexity.
- Enhanced Situational Awareness: With new aircraft types, operations, and levels of autonomy, leveraging ground-based systems and having a digital twin of the environment is paramount.
- Dynamic Airspace Management: The ability to adapt and make decisions in real-time brings predictability, even with increased air traffic.
But digital tools also require new models for trust, safety, and approval.
Moving to digital systems means rethinking how we achieve safety; safety and cybersecurity assessment models must evolve to account for autonomy, AI, distributed networks, and cloud infrastructure. Adopting zero-trust models and focusing on determinism, where a system performs the same way every time it encounters a specific situation, is essential for approval and public trust.
SkyGrid’s Digital Infrastructure
SkyGrid is building the digital backbone that is essential for this evolution. As a Third-Party Service Provider (TSP), we deliver high-assurance, high-integrity, and low-latency digital services to enable situational awareness, trajectory coordination, and data exchange at scale.
We ensure that data is not only from an authoritative, trusted source, but is also transformed into actionable information for the right stakeholders at the right time. Our ground-based system provides decision support to AAM operators, enhancing safety and efficiency across the ecosystem and ensuring interoperability between all parties.
Building the Future Together
Innovation can’t scale without ecosystem alignment. Success requires collaboration beyond traditional aviation players—regulators, Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), manufacturers, and operators—to include new AAM stakeholders globally, like TSPs, cities, vertiport developers, and land managers. The focus must be on proving autonomous flight can operate safely through rigorous testing, simulations, and service development. This collaboration must be built on a foundation of digital systems that can scale safely and efficiently.
A digital-first mindset is about reimagining airspace management for safe, scalable operations across increasingly automated skies. Organizations that embrace this shift now will help shape the future airspace.