At the cutting edge of aerospace innovation, novel advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft and technologies are poised to redefine how passengers and cargo move through complex, multi-use transportation networks. What early use cases could reap the benefits of this opportunity to enhance door-to-door mobility? The AIAA AAM Multimodal Working Group, in partnership with the Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS America) formally began this conversation with a webinar in June 2025, and expanded their programming with an in-person workshop in July at 2025 AIAA AVIATION Forum, “Early Use Cases for AAM Integration in Multimodal Transportation.”
The workshop brought together a wide range of experience and knowledge from domestic and international industry leaders, policymakers, infrastructure experts, academics, and community representatives. Participants were drawn by the belief that aviation’s contribution to the multimodal ecosystem is essential and depends on:
- A holistic vision shifting toward door‑to‑door mobility
- Strategic pilot use cases targeting resilience, equity, and public value
- Coordination at state and local levels, with agile institutional frameworks
- Public engagement, robust data systems, infrastructure readiness, and a multidisciplinary rapid prototyping and solution-oriented approach
The workshop kicked off by highlighting the working group’s vision: moving beyond traditional gate‑to‑gate travel in aviation, decoupled with other transportation modes, toward a seamless, door‑to‑door mobility experience. The workshop was poised to identify early use cases that could be addressed by and benefit from this vision.
We urged a “passenger-oriented total mobility” paradigm – the design of an integrated ecosystem in which passengers and freight can transfer effortlessly among car, train, ferry, air taxi, and other modes through a unified data fabric and integrated end-to-end solutions. An example use case from Contra Costa County in California’s San Francisco Bay Area was presented and challenges, such as lack of mobility for underserved communities, underutilized airports and infrastructure, and a siloed culture that can be addressed with a total mobility paradigm shift, were highlighted.
Participants were split into four groups, with the workshop run in two sessions. In the first session, each group was tasked with identifying and defining a use case using four criteria:
- Mobility need that can be served
- Challenges in serving that mobility need today
- Opportunities that can be leveraged to address those challenges
- Stakeholders who must be engaged to enable the use case
In the second session, the participants discussed solutions to address the use cases identified in the first session. Two topics with particularly dynamic engagement were transportation needs for commuters and scaling aerial health services.
The first set of use cases had the common theme of mobility needs of commuters. Examples were shared from multiple locales, including the United States, Europe, India, and Korea. Providing emergency health services, rural health, organ transport, and disaster relief were some of the use cases identified, encompassing the second theme of expanding healthcare. Participants noted that the traditional health care system relies heavily on the consolidation of costly services in big urban facilities. It is challenging to provide access over longer distances, reduce response times, minimize transportation losses, and maintain adequate safety of operations. Aviation presents an opportunity to increase the catchment area of such facilities to reduce response times by using rapid deployment of novel aircraft with reduced operational footprint and to improve accessibility to health services. Underutilized helipads (such as several hundred in Tokyo), a move toward telehealth (where distant patients can visit in person as needed and more frequently), and optimizing the consolidation vs. dispersion of health services could address this mobility need.
The group also discussed the need to build a resilient “data fabric” for a multimodal ecosystem. It is necessary to provide a unified and consistent way to access, manage, and share data seamlessly across transportation modes. Weather data collection, dispersion, and update was discussed as a critical example where its impact is often different in aviation vs. other non-aviation modes. During severe weather events, the system would need to be resilient to such differences to enable the flow of passenger and vehicle information across agencies and networks. Similarly, newer tools are needed to combine aviation-specific services like operational geofencing, noise monitoring, and airspace access compliance tracking with passenger demand and movement data on the ground. Together, these will feed into passenger-centric operational models that are needed to address the early use cases and beyond.
The road to multimodal transport integration of aviation is not just technical – it’s societal, spatial, and collaborative. There are many follow-on activities in various planning stages for the AAM Multimodal Working Group. They include the conversion to a formal Integration and Outreach Division Committee, a first meeting under the community’s new structure at AIAA SciTech Forum 2026, publication of the multi-journal special issue on multimodal transportation systems led by AIAA’s Journal of Air Transportation in conjunction with IEEE and Informs, a webinar featuring highlights from the special issue, and planning for the second edition of the workshop, which will be held at AIAA AVIATION Forum 2026.
