A trip that takes ninety minutes by road in an Indian city, can be covered by a small aircraft in just ten minutes. That gap – between how cities have grown and how people move through them – is what a new class of electric aircraft is going to address.
Known as Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOLs), they take off and land vertically, run on batteries, and are designed for short hops over the traffic below. After a decade of development, they are close to being certified abroad to carry passengers.
But certifying the aircraft is only half the task. Putting them to use will take airspace that regulators and developers open together, vertiports and charging units built in crowded cities, and fares within reach of ordinary riders – and the countries that do that groundwork today, are the ones that will be ready when the aircraft arrives.
A New Category Reaches Certification
Currently, a new category of aircraft is moving from prototype to certification stage. eVTOL aircraft – battery-powered, able to take off and land without a runway and designed for short trips over congested cities and regions – form the core of what the industry calls Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), and in its city-focused form, Urban Air Mobility (UAM).
Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft promises to transform urban transit by compressing hour-plus, gridlocked road commutes into short, 10-minute aerial hops over congested cities
Over the past decade, developers in the United States, Europe, China and Brazil have moved these aircraft from concept to flight tests, and several have advanced to the certification stage with their national regulators.
India has its own entrants; Sarla Aviation is among the domestic companies working on the aircraft. The question for the country is no longer whether the technology will arrive, but what role it will play when it does.
Part of a Broader Transition
AAM does not sit in isolation. It belongs alongside a wider set of technologies India is investing in through this decade – drones, Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) and the digital systems that coordinate them.
Much of the underlying capability is shared: airspace digitisation, electric propulsion and the software that manages large numbers of aircraft operating at low-altitude urban airspace. India has built real momentum in drones, in both policy and domestic manufacturing, and that groundwork is directly relevant to passenger air mobility. The same regulatory questions, the same airspace problems and much of the same infrastructure logic carry over.
While lighter applications like cargo transport are expanding, passenger eVTOLs set the highest safety and regulatory standards, serving as the critical benchmark that forces airspace design, vertiport infrastructure and grid capacity to rapidly mature
Why Passenger eVTOLs Matter Most
Within that landscape, passenger eVTOLs are worth singling out. They are the most demanding application – carrying people over cities imposes the highest safety bar – and therefore, the one that forces every other part of the system to mature.
Solve the airspace, the infrastructure and the certification framework for passenger eVTOLs, and lighter uses such as cargo and inspection follow more easily.
It is also the segment where the global market is converging fastest, which means the standards being written now will shape the industry for years. There is already market interest in India: Archer Aviation and InterGlobe, the group behind IndiGo, have signed an agreement to launch an air taxi service in the country. The demand side is not hypothetical.
Certification Abroad, Deployment at Home
In this scenario, India has a genuine choice to make. The aircraft themselves are being certified in the United States and Europe on timelines largely outside India’s control. But certification abroad does not automatically mean deployment at home.
A country can wait until a design is fully proven elsewhere and adopt it later, or it can build the domestic regulatory and operational readiness to deploy soon after – or alongside – global certification.
Aircraft certification abroad does not guarantee seamless adoption at home; success depends on proactive governments establishing vertiport guidelines, airspace integration and pilot licensing frameworks well before the technology lands
India has taken early steps in this direction. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation published guidance on vertiport design and on eVTOL type certification in 2024, and has established working groups across the areas that matter: certification, infrastructure, crew licensing and air traffic. That kind of preparation is what separates leaders from others.
The Government as an Enabler
What makes AAM different from most consumer technology is that it cannot succeed without the government as an active participant. eVTOL developers do not simply sell a product into an open market. They need airspace to fly-in and infrastructure to operate from, and both are shaped or controlled by the state.
Integrating these aircraft into existing airspace – safely, at scale, over cities – is a problem only a regulator can solve, working closely with developers. This is where India can create an advantage.
A government that leans in early, and treats airspace integration as a design problem to be solved rather than a permission to be granted, can move faster than markets where the state stays at arm’s length. The relationship between developer and regulator is closer in this industry than in almost any other, and countries that recognise this will set the pace.
Scaling air taxis beyond a niche luxury service requires solving real-world operational logistics – from securing high-power charging grids and prime urban real estate to establishing affordable fare structures for everyday commuters
What Else Has to Be Built
Airspace and certification are necessary but not sufficient. Several other things have to be in place for UAM to work as a real service rather than a demonstration.
Vertiports – the takeoff and landing sites – have to be planned for cities where land is scarce and expensive, and sited where people actually want to travel. The electrical grid has to support high-power charging at those sites, which ties AAM to the broader electrification and energy questions India is already working through.
And the economics have to close: an air taxi has to be priced within reach of enough riders to sustain a network, not just serve a handful of premium trips. None of these is a technology problem in the narrow sense. They are questions of planning, coordination, and policy – which is why the countries that get them right at the start will be the ones that treat AAM as a system, not a gadget.
The Opportunity
The eVTOL will get certified; that is settled. What remains open is which countries will have done the unglamorous work – the airspace, the infrastructure, the rules, the economics – to put it to use efficiently, when it arrives. For India, this decade is the window. The technology is coming on its own schedule. The opportunity is to be ready for it.
The writer is Product and Commercialisation Lead at Wisk Aero, a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing. The views expressed are of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Raksha Anirveda
