Risk-Informed Urban Air Mobility Flight Operations in Convective Weather Conditions and Aircraft Constraints

In this paper, we present a risk assessment approach for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) flight operation planning that jointly considers airspace constraints, aircraft performance, regulatory requirements, and operator fleet resources. Time-varying airspace constraints arising from convective weather are modeled as dynamic obstacles within a UAM service region, and pre-flight trajectory planning is performed at multiple altitudes to safely maneuver aircraft around unsafe airspace states. The planned trajectories are evaluated in terms of energy consumption for two representative UAM configurations: a stopped-rotor and a tilt-rotor aircraft. The flight operation risk is then quantified as a function of the trajectory energy demand, the available battery capacity, and the required reserve energy. A holistic battery aging model that combines cyclic and calendar aging is used to map aircraft battery age to available battery capacity of the aircraft, thus capturing aircraft-level constraints. To account for operator resources, we perform a sensitivity analysis over different fleet age compositions: right-skewed, uniform, and left-skewed distributions and quantify the resulting risk levels probabilistically across multiple altitudes of the flight. The proposed approach supports informed operational planning of UAM services in a given region by explicitly linking time-varying airspace constraints, aircraft constraints, regulatory requirements, and operator fleet composition to flight risk.