UTA emerges as hub for next-gen air travel
As the flying taxi industry begins to take shape, researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington are helping lay the groundwork for urban air mobility in North Texas, from infrastructure planning to safety and flight systems.
Over the last several years, UTA researchers have received grants to explore where these aircraft will take off and land, how they will navigate safely, how they can be manufactured at scale, and how they withstand the punishing wear and tear of frequent short trips. Taken together, that body of work reflects a growing research portfolio focused on the real-world challenges that must be solved before flying taxis can operate reliably in urban environments.
“New technology takes time, from earning public trust to working out the kinks in the infrastructure and routes to bringing down operational costs,” said Jinzhu Yu, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering.
Dr. Yu is one of the researchers who has been tapped to help make flying taxis a reality in North Texas. The North Central Texas Council of Governments tasked Yu with identifying the best locations for vertiports, specialized hubs for aircraft that take off and land vertically.
Related: NASA invests in UTA materials research for safer flight
Yu and his team are using advanced data analytics, modeling and optimization techniques to evaluate potential sites. Their analysis considers key factors like population density, socioeconomic conditions, traffic demand, accessibility to major event venues and environmental impact.
“Our goal is to identify locations that maximize convenience and efficiency while minimizing impacts on existing transportation networks and communities,” Yu said.
To start, Yu said vertiports will likely be located at major airports across DFW, as these sites already have the infrastructure to support aircraft operations, including maintenance, fueling and passenger services. However, he acknowledged that widespread adoption of flying taxis will take time.
Demand for flying taxis is being driven by growing congestion in major metropolitan areas and the search for faster, more flexible transportation options that can operate above ground traffic rather than adding to it.
But like any new technology, flying taxis undergo extensive testing to ensure public safety.
Recently, Xin (Jeffrey) Liu, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering who also holds a joint appointment in the Institute of Predictive Performance Methodologies at the UTA Research Institute in Fort Worth, received a NASA MUREP grant to develop a new class of impact-resistant materials designed to protect next-generation aircraft during extreme landing or collision events.
“This project is trying to improve the safety of advanced air mobility aircraft,” Dr. Liu said. “Before we implement these new transportation technologies, we have to ensure that the structures, pilots and passengers are all safe.”
Liu’s team is developing a lattice metamaterial—a man-made structure fabricated through additive manufacturing—designed to dissipate impact energy in multiple stages. The material first absorbs energy through elastic deformation, allowing it to return to its original shape after normal landings. If a landing exceeds a certain load threshold, a second energy-dissipation phase activates to prevent catastrophic structural damage.
“The first step allows the material to recover its shape during soft landings,” Liu explained. “If there is a hard landing or collision, the second step dissipates a large amount of energy to reduce damage to the airframe and impact loads on passengers and pilots.”
Paving the way forward
Before Yu and Liu received their most recent grants, UTA had already been pioneering research in this field.
Even if the aircraft, autonomy stack and vertiports are ready, a flying taxi ecosystem will still stall if manufacturing can’t deliver high-performance airframes efficiently and cost-effectively.
UTA is addressing that challenge through research into automated composite manufacturing for smaller unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and urban air mobility vehicles. In a UTA project funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Paul Davidson, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is leading efforts to bring automation to small composite structures—a task more difficult than working with large-aircraft composites because smaller vehicles often have complex shapes and higher curvature.
Dr. Davidson’s project combines automated composite manufacturing with traditional molding to increase output and improve structural performance. The work focuses on challenges such as shearing and wrinkling in composites for smaller UAV and urban air mobility platforms—issues that can drive overdesign and reduce performance.
In other words, UTA’s research portfolio is not only asking “can this aircraft fly?” but also, “Can we build enough of them, reliably, to matter?”
Advanced air mobility will ultimately depend on industry adoption, meaning research must translate into deployable systems and partnerships that bring real aircraft, real sensors and real operating constraints into the lab.
UTA’s work includes a partnership with Galaxy Unmanned Systems LLC to develop controls that enable autonomous flight systems, with an eventual objective tied to urban air mobility. In that effort, UTA researchers are equipping an airship with algorithms, software and sensors—such as lidars, vision cameras and air data sensors—to provide situational awareness, along with sensor-fusion and guidance and control systems aimed at enabling autonomous navigation and collision avoidance.
The project’s long-term possibilities include moving cargo or passengers, reflecting how autonomous flight research can serve multiple pathways into the broader advanced air mobility ecosystem.
In all, UTA is emerging as a research hub for the next mode of transportation.
About The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA)
The University of Texas at Arlington is a growing public research university in the heart of Dallas-Fort Worth. With a student body of over 42,700, UTA is the second-largest institution in the University of Texas System, offering more than 180 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Recognized as a Carnegie R-1 university, UTA stands among the nation’s top 5% of institutions for research activity. UTA and its 280,000 alumni generate an annual economic impact of $28.8 billion for the state. The University has received the Innovation and Economic Prosperity designation from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and has earned recognition for its focus on student access and success, considered key drivers to economic growth and social progress for North Texas and beyond.