The Role of Resilience in Advanced Air Mobility: Human-AI Teaming, Supervisory Operations, and Socio-Technical Adaptation

Abstract

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) signals a transformative shift in aviation, introducing new vehicle types, operational models, and urban–regional transport that challenge traditional airspace management, regulation, and human performance. As AAM systems become more automated, data-driven, and distributed, resilience becomes key for safe, sustainable deployment. This paper explores resilience at the individual, team, organisational, and system levels, which are crucial for anticipating, absorbing, adapting to, and recovering from disruptions in complex environments.It places AAM within emerging mobility systems, leveraging technologies such as electric propulsion, autonomous systems, urban vertiports, airspace algorithms, and AI traffic management (UTM/UTM-X). These introduce operational interdependence, variable data quality, rapid scaling, evolving regulations, and unique failure modes. Resilience is vital for managing disruptions and ensuring safe operations amid system unpredictability, weather, cyber threats, and human–machine interactions. Resilience is also viewed as a human-centered and socio-technical trait. Operator and team resilience depends on adaptability, awareness, cross-monitoring, improvisation, and workload management, primarily as remote pilots and controllers oversee autonomous networks. Training should include scenario-based learning, degraded-mode simulations, and strategies for uncertainty and automation surprises. At the organisational level, resilience involves adaptive Safety Management Systems (SMS), predictive analytics, communication, and coordination among urban planners, regulators, air navigation service providers, manufacturers, and emergency services. Organizations must learn quickly from signals, adapt procedures in real time, and align strategies with human and urban limits. Governance must go beyond compliance to continuous monitoring, foresight, and proactive risk management.System resilience involves infrastructure, airspace design, digital ecosystems, and policies. Resilience in vertiport design, UAM corridors, networks, energy, and multimodal interfaces is crucial, requiring principles such as redundancy, diversity, modularity, and graceful degradation to keep systems operational in the face of failures. The paper concludes with a resilience framework emphasising human–machine teamwork, adaptive governance, cross-sector learning, and socio-technical integration. Success depends on technological innovation and the ability of organisations and ecosystems to adapt, remain human-centered, and resilient. Operational models like Single Pilot Operations (SiPO) and AI-supported supervision highlight early resilience challenges in AAM.