With over 150 air vehicles in development, along with supporting technologies, service concepts and infrastructure schemes, urban air mobility (UAM) is viewed by many companies as their next big thing. Billions of dollars will need to be spent to bring these concepts to market. This raises the question of market size and whether or not the market will justify this massive investment.First, any dispassionate market analysis should view UAM vehicles as rotorcraft. The terms "flying car" and "flying taxi" get used a lot, perhaps because UAM boosters want to tap into the much larger ground transport market. But UAM vehicles will not be used in a multimodal way, and the proposed vehicles aren't designed for road travel. Instead, they will do what existing rotorcraft do: transport people over short ranges with vertical takeoff and landing- at the lowest possible price point, of course.Therefore, we should use the small civil rotorcraft market as a starting point for discussion. In support of this, Teal Group has looked at all deliveries of inexpensive (under about $2 million) light turbine and piston helicopters over the past 15 years. These include all Robinson models, Bell's 206 and 505, Airbus' now-dead H120, the MD500 series and others. While many of these are not used for intracity transport, it is fair to assume that many UAM vehicles will find applications with police forces or for tourism or news stations, so we'll look at the market for everything small, inexpensive and capable of vertical flight.
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