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Say “advanced air mobility” and most people picture an air taxi—an electric pod lifting off a rooftop and turning the highway into something three-dimensional. It’s an easy image to love, and it’s coming. But it’s the destination, not the starting line. The near-term reality of advanced air mobility (AAM) is far more practical. It’s about moving packages, medical supplies, and emergency response using cleaner electric and hybrid aircraft, both piloted and uncrewed.  

The momentum is real. Analysts size the global AAM market at roughly $13 billion in 2025, with projections climbing toward $87 billion by 2034, though estimates vary widely depending on how each firm defines the category. Federal regulators are moving, too: in 2025 the FAA published its certification path for powered-lift aircraft and stood up an eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) to get real operations into US airspace. Utah was one of eight eIPP partners selected in March of 2026. Salas O’Brien, working with the 47G aerospace alliance, is helping Utah build toward a functioning network in time for the 2034 Winter Olympics, starting with cargo and medical flights well before any passenger ever climbs aboard.  

Here’s the thing: none of this future happens in the air without ground infrastructure. And most of it isn’t glamorous.  

The reframe: this isn’t an airport story

It’s tempting to file AAM under “airports.” That’s the wrong drawer. The whole point of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is to extend outside of airports. The value is decentralization: bringing flight closer to where people live, where goods are needed, and where services have to reach.  

AAM is aviation, but it also runs straight through manufacturing (building the aircraft and their components), electrical infrastructure (the charging backbone), and healthcare, emergency response, and logistics (the first real payloads). It’s less a runway and more a network.  

The sequence is driven by revenue and a proven safety record. Passenger air taxis are the ultimate goal, but the first act is commercial cargo and services that earn real money and build a safety track record over thousands of flight hours, so passenger travel arrives on a foundation that’s already proven. 

Where is the early revenue and safety record built? Three places:  

1. Cargo and last-mile delivery. The last mile is the most expensive leg of shipping—by some estimates up to 53% of total delivery cost. Small, light packages are exactly what drones handle well, letting freight skip several of the ever-smaller sorting steps between warehouse and doorstep.  
2. Medical logistics. A regional hospital waiting hours for a specialized surgical part or a short-half-life compound is a problem electric flight solves elegantly. Drone medical delivery is already cutting delivery times from hours to minutes—time that matters when a patient is on the table.  
3. Emergency response. In wildfire response and search-and-rescue, coordinated eVTOLs equipped with thermal and LIDAR imaging can operate closer to the ground and in conditions dangerous for crewed aircraft, keeping people out of harm’s way while extending the reach of teams already doing this work. 

Beyond these revenue drivers, the same technology extends to work already happening, like inspecting dams, bridges, transmission towers, and pipelines, where uncrewed aircraft reach heights  and hazards that would otherwise put crews on ropes or in helicopters. 

Getting from here to there starts with power

Before the infrastructure for AAM makes sense, it helps to be clear about what’s changing in the aircraft itself. Most flight today runs on jet fuel. Advanced air mobility swaps that for electric propulsion—batteries and electric motors, or hybrids that pair a small onboard generator with those motors for extra range. It’s the same electrification happening with cars, just harder, because weight matters far more once you leave the ground. 

There are two ways these aircraft get airborne. Some take off with a conventional horizontal roll, building speed on a wing like a traditional airplane. Others rise straight up. Electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL. (The “e” is what separates it from a helicopter.) The vertical kind draws most of the attention, because skipping the runway is exactly what lets these aircraft operate close to where people already are. 

So why electric? Because it provides quieter, cleaner aircraft with far fewer moving parts to maintain, compact enough to land almost anywhere, and simple enough to fly uncrewed. The real engineering challenge is the power-to-weight ratio of today’s batteries, which is why hybrids matter in the near term, and why charging becomes the thing everything else depends on. 

Building out the infrastructure to make this real

The first piece of infrastructure AAM needs isn’t a signature vertiport. It’s a place to plug in. High-density charging is the constraint that everything else folds in behind.  

Anyone who has driven an electric car on a road trip already understands the problem. Buy an electric vehicle (EV) in a region without dense fast-charging along your route, and a five-hour drive becomes an eight-hour ordeal. If the charger isn’t there—or isn’t the right kind for your vehicle—range and confidence collapse. Now put that aircraft in the sky, where “pull over and wait” isn’t an option. Without reliable, fast charging in the right places, aircraft can’t fly often enough to be commercially viable, and the whole model falls apart.  

The practical path is to start simple and let demand draw the map. There’s an old piece of Frank Lloyd Wright lore that he’d wait to see where people actually walked before pouring the sidewalks. AAM infrastructure works best the same way. Put charging first at the places that already make sense—existing airports, hospitals, and cargo or intermodal hubs—then let the landing pads and more sophisticated control systems grow as traffic grows. Starting lean keeps costs down and gets aircraft in the air sooner, even if early networks have limited range and a limited number of stops. Hybrids help here, trading some emissions savings for meaningfully more range. Over time, a rough hierarchy takes shape:  

• Large hubs, typically near airports, where travelers transfer to regional vertical-lift trips.  

• Intermodal hubs where trains, buses, and taxis already converge—useful for a major event such as an Olympic venue.  

• Ubiquitous vertistops, closer to a bus stop than a terminal. This could be a pad, a gate you tap your phone to enter, and a drone that meets you on reservation.  

The common thread underneath all of it is a grid robust enough to deliver power where you want the network to go.  

The hard parts—and why they’re solvable

Three challenges stand out, and each is being worked on right now.  

Regulation is the pacing item. The aircraft and their control systems are already there. The gap is in the permissions that let uncrewed aircraft share the sky with crewed ones. The trickiest piece isn’t the airlines, with their well-defined altitudes and highly trained pilots; it’s general aviation, where pilots fly by visual rules with far less instrumentation. Expect some of the earliest new rule sets—likely altitude limits and separation requirements—to emerge right there. Utah’s phased approach, beginning with tightly controlled cargo and medical drone missions, is one way the industry is closing that gap.  

Security changes shape. The post-9/11 TSA model was built for large aircraft carrying hundreds of people. The big risk isn’t someone slipping through a checkpoint; it’s someone hacking a drone. In practice, AAM security will look more like transit-system security than an airport terminal, and it will evolve as operations move from cargo to passengers.  

Fragmentation is a big threat. The EV world offers a cautionary tale: drivers of non-dominant brands still hunt for compatible fast chargers because the market never fully standardized. AAM can avoid repeating that mistake, but only if the industry aligns early on consistent designs and standards. Standardization is what turns a collection of one-off projects into a system that travelers and operators can trust, much like navigating an unfamiliar airport, where the gates, signage, and checkpoints follow a familiar logic.  

None of these are oversights by the people doing the work; they’re the shared growing pains of an industry inventing itself in real time. Solving them takes more than aircraft makers and regulators. It takes engineering partners who work the ground-level problems every day.  

How Salas O’Brien is helping

The next-generation aircraft get the attention, but the work that makes them useful happens on the ground—and that’s the work we do. 

We are experts in electrification. Designing charging stations, making the grid changes needed to get power to sites, and doing it affordably and fast is exactly the kind of problem we solve. From there, it extends naturally to the vertiports and vertistops themselves—the fire protection, life safety, and building systems that keep these facilities ready to operate day in and day out—and to the command-and-control environments that keep the network running safely. 

That work is already underway. As a member of 47G, Utah’s aerospace and defense alliance, we’re part of the team helping build out the state’s advanced air mobility program—the effort working toward a functioning network for the 2034 Winter Olympics, beginning with cargo and medical flights. It’s exactly the kind of early, real-world program where the ground infrastructure gets worked out in practice, and we’ve been sharing what we’re learning along the way, including at the Advanced Air Mobility Conference. 

Just as important is perspective. Because AAM cuts across aviation, manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics, it rewards a partner who works across all of them and thinks in decades, not quarters—including helping shape standards early, so the infrastructure built now doesn’t become the constraint later. 

It isn’t the marquee role. But it’s an essential one: the practical, on-the-ground engineering that turns the big idea into something that flies. 

Reach out to [email protected] to connect with our aviation team. 

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