Should I board this Advanced Air Mobility vehicle? A systemic risk assessment of eVTOL in a vertiport

Abstract: Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) vehicles can serve a wide range of operations, supporting passenger and cargo movements within and between urban and rural environments. Novel risks emerge from AAM systems with respect to both airborne and ground segments, calling for the adoption of systems theory and a systemic perspective for safety risk management. In this domain, Systems Theoretic Accident Modelling and Processes (STAMP) is an accident causality model that considers safety as a continuous control task. The scientific literature already offers some applications of STAMP and its nested techniques, i.e., System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) and Causal Analysis based on System Theory (CAST), for investigating the safety management in the AAM domain. However, to the best of our knowledge, no contributions use as a unit of analysis the management of safe operations for an AAM system by adopting an integrated perspective to account for the interactions among different kinds of vehicles within vertiports and airports. For this reason, the manuscript proposes a systemic analysis for the safety management of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles operating at a vertiport located inside an airport. We employed the STPA technique, whose usage has been enhanced thanks to a standardized and neutralized taxonomy describing human factors involved in the operations. This allowed for embracing a no-blame and non-judgemental human perspective, which benefits from the systemic view offered by STPA.

Keywords: Urban Air Mobility, Next-Generation Green Aircraft, Operations Management, Safety Recommendations

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005196

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