Advanced air mobility in the UAE: climate-resilient risk and reliability of UAVs versus traditional couriers

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), which leverages technologies like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), promises faster and more flexible urban freight, but its large-scale deployment depends on trade-offs between efficiency, reliability, and system readiness. In the United Arab Emirates, where intense heat, high humidity, strong winds, and sandstorms are common, assessing UAV performance under these climatic stresses is particularly critical. This study compares UAV-based systems with traditional couriers by developing a comprehensive techno-economic model that incorporates exponential reliability functions, detailed cost breakdowns, and an Operational Integration Index (OII), which is defined as the product of route efficiency, system interoperability, and infrastructure readiness. The model was evaluated through Monte Carlo simulations and exhibited a mean reliability of 0.604 (±0.347) for UAVs versus 1.0003 (±0.0021) for trucks. The resulting mean Performance Indices were 0.0095 for UAVs and 0.0987 for trucks, indicating substantially lower and more variable reliability and cost-effectiveness for UAVs compared to traditional couriers. The Operational Integration Index from the calibration indicates lower integration readiness for UAVs (OII = 0.288) compared with trucks (OII = 0.421). Spearman rank correlations reveal that temperature (ρ = -0.464) and wind speed (ρ = -0.456) are the primary drivers of UAV performance, with humidity (ρ = -0.237) moderate and sandstorms negligible (ρ = -0.021), whereas traditional couriers show only weak or non-significant weather dependencies (|ρ | < 0.07). The study underscores the policy challenge of balancing efficiency gains with reliability, environmental sensitivity, and infrastructure readiness in AAM, offering recommendations for regulators and planners on safe system integration.