Urban Air Mobility Flight Demand Modeling for Airports in New York City

Rapid urbanization has intensified congestion and travel delays in New York City, motivating interest in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) as a faster and more reliable option for accessing the region’s three major airports: John F. Kennedy (JFK), LaGuardia (LGA), and Newark Liberty (EWR). This paper develops a data-driven framework for forecasting UAM demand by integrating 2023 New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission trip records with socioeconomic and geospatial taxi-zone features. A Generalized Cost of Trip (GCT), combining monetary cost, value of time (VOT), and value of reliability (VOR), is computed for airport-bound origin–destination pairs and used to estimate mode-switching probabilities across early, mid, and mature UAM phases. Results show that several high-congestion Manhattan zones exhibit lower UAM GCT than taxis even in the early phase for all three airports, while Queens and Brooklyn become competitive as UAM costs decline and cruise speeds increase. Hourly switching patterns reveal that reliability-sensitive peak periods drive the highest adoption, with mature-phase conditions capturing over 80–95% of airport trips from major pickup zones. These findings demonstrate that UAM offers increasing advantages for airport access as congestion and technology evolve, providing quantitative guidance for fleet sizing, vertiport siting, pricing strategies, and phased deployment planning in dense metropolitan regions.