Urban Air Mobility (UAM) constitutes a future aerial mobility alternative, which concerns the use of electric and autonomous aerial vehicles for transporting people throughout a planned network of vertiports. To materialize UAM, several actors of the air and urban transport ecosystem play a vital role. This paper describes the insights gathered from 32 key stakeholders around the world to present and frame the key aspects for the future implementation of UAM. The participants include representatives from the UAM industry such as airports, airlines, aviation consulting companies, academia, and authorities. The data collection encompasses various key research areas, covering topics such as UAM strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks, requirements for implementation, concept integration in the existing transport system, specific use cases, business models, and end-user segments. The research aims at setting up the stakeholder scene and expanding the current literature for UAM by engaging key decision makers and experts towards shaping the new mobility era. The results demonstrate that ensuring certification standards for UAM fleets and updating the current legal and regulatory framework are the main prerequisites for UAM’s realization. In addition, the usage of UAM for transporting cargo or for air ambulance services are the most mature business models for the coming decade.

This paper aims at exploring the efficiency of regional airports, whose traffic is highly dependent on touristic flows, and the impact of some external factors such as low-cost airlines, charter air traffic and seasonality. The analysis focuses on the airport market in Greece within the time period from 2010 to 2016. A bootstrapped data envelopment analysis model is developed and the Malmquist Productivity Index is computed to estimate the total productivity change between 2010 and 2016. This is followed by a tobit regression model to estimate the impact of the external factors on the airport efficiency scores. Our findings indicate that the considered factors significantly affect airport efficiency. More specifically, the low-cost airlines and charter flights contribute to increasing airport efficiency, while the seasonality might be seen as an obstacle to improving airport efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this research goes beyond any previous study in the Greek airport market and could be useful for several practitioners, such as airlines, airport operators and hotel businesses, as well as policy-makers and authorities.