Introduction of a Highly Iterative Design Process for Air Taxis

The introduction of Air Taxis offers significant potential to transform the future mobility ecosystem by lifting on-demand individual mobility into the third dimension of transportation. Hence, Air Taxis are considered an innovative and promising solution for the increasing global demand of individual mobility. However, the innovative nature of Air Taxis introduces new challenges to the traditional aircraft design process. On the one hand, the multitude of Air Taxi configurations as well as the integration of innovative technologies require a novel technological alignment of the design process. On the other hand, the higher production quantities as well as the wide variety of competitors and the unclear stakeholder requirements, as markets for Air Taxis do not yet exist, pose further challenges to the design process. As a result, there is a need for an innovative aircraft design process adapted to the technical as well as market challenges of Air Taxis. Therefore, this paper presents a process for designing a feasible, viable, and desirable Air Taxi in an innovative and highly iterative manner. An extensive literature analysis of the state of the art in aircraft design confirms the deficient depiction of these practical needs by the classical approaches from research. Based on the assessment of established aircraft design processes, an applicable process for the design of Air Taxis is derived and described in detail. The proposed process includes advantageous features of established aircraft design processes as well as suitable elements derived from agile product development processes. Due to the high market and technology uncertainties, a continuous verification with suitable methods is necessary. Hence, the outlined design process is enriched with a multitude of verification methods matching the specific demands of each design phase.