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India’s air taxi ambition may find wings in global regulatory convergence, but without infrastructure, affordability, and governance reform, it risks never taking off.
India’s urban mobility reflects a paradox. While the country has invested heavily in metro rail and expressways as proud symbols of modernity, its cities continue to face severe road congestion, informal paratransit modes, and fragmented public transportation systems. Consequently, the country’s urban mobility displays a dichotomy, where capital-intensive mega projects coexist with neglected bus-based transit, minimal attention to water transport, and poor modal integration. However, the country’s urban transportation landscape is set to gain a new entrant: the air taxi, which promises to literally ‘fly over’ ground transportation woes.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement that air taxis will soon become a reality, reiterated by Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Rammohan Naidu's statement that air taxi trials will commence in Delhi, Mumbai and Pune in 2026, has excited the private sector. In September 2024, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued guidelines for the design, operation, and authorisation of vertiports, aligning with the operations of electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, followed by an advisory circular on their airworthiness certification. These developments have encouraged India’s regulators, state governments, airport operators, and investors to converge on an idea that can either radically transform urban mobility or remain an expensive illusion limited to sporadic pilot attempts.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued guidelines for the design, operation, and authorisation of vertiports, aligning with the operations of electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, followed by an advisory circular on their airworthiness certification.
A recent international development on Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) has paved the way for broader international convergence on regulatory and certification mechanisms, providing enhanced opportunities for cities in India and around the world to kickstart air taxi operations.
In April 2025, the National Aviation Authorities (NAA) Network, comprising the civil aviation authorities of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), published the Roadmap for Advanced Air Mobility Aircraft Type Certification. This roadmap represents the first attempt by leading regulators to establish a shared certification framework for air taxis and cargo drones. It thus addresses a significant regulatory vacuum, where fragmented certification and validation rules have restricted companies involved in designing and testing prototypes from commercial scale-up. It outlines six principles (Figure 1) that aim to discard the hitherto siloed national rule-making process to foster mutual certification and validation, thereby enabling faster adoption of air taxis and cargo drones into active service.
Figure 1: The Six Guiding Principles of The Roadmap for AAM Aircraft Type Certification
Source: US Federal Aviation Administration
Rather than creating a universal rulebook, the roadmap proposes staged convergence through alignment on: a) performance-based requirements, b) resolving divergent requirements, and c) the application of mutually accepted Means of Compliance to streamline multi-authority validation and certification.
This three-phased approach distributes regulatory oversight, allowing early entrants to be certified under agreed principles. It also addresses the concerns of market uncertainty, regulations, technology and supply chain, which have so far prevented large-scale implementation.
The roadmap’s mutual acceptance of certification removes barriers for companies seeking to enter cross-border markets, ensuring quicker validation.
The roadmap also prioritises data sharing, joint safety assessments, and collaborative validation exercises among the NAA Network authorities, enabling the consolidation of operational data, testing protocols, and interoperability principles to facilitate the transition from prototype demos to certified air taxi fleets.
At the same time, it foregrounds safety. It prescribes a pragmatic, incremental certification and deployment model, which prioritises operations in low-density urban corridors to mitigate risks and accelerate learning, as well as for emergency response use. It recommends expanding their use for passenger services based on the performance evaluation of AAM vehicles in such controlled environments.
From a policy perspective, the roadmap’s emphasis on harmonised adoption and bilateral frameworks is unique. Historically, aircraft certification has been fragmented, with each national authority applying its own standards under the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Annex 8. The roadmap’s mutual acceptance of certification removes barriers for companies seeking to enter cross-border markets, ensuring quicker validation. This enables faster access to tested and certified platforms, supporting the scaling of air taxi services, particularly in rapidly growing cities in the Global South.
To ensure the same safety outcomes in all jurisdictions, the roadmap establishes flexible safety standards that accommodate innovation, given the unique design, system configuration, and autonomy, by prioritising performance-based requirements and shared Means of Compliance.
While the framework’s regulatory harmonisation vision is enticing, the challenge lies in translating it into workable systems in Indian cities.
The DGCA has formulated the Drone Rules 2021 (amended in 2022). It has also developed the Digital Sky Platform for unmanned aerial traffic management, which is crucial for integrating eVTOLs with urban transportation. However, AAM regulation involves much more oversight: safety, integration with controlled airspace, and high-density operations. The roadmap thus provides India with a template for structuring its own certification regime, enabling the DGCA to adapt and align its regulations with global best practices while tailoring standards to Indian conditions.
Moreover, speedy adaptation will also require early and seamless alignment of the DGCA’s 2024 advisory circular, which specifies the airworthiness certification criteria for eVTOL aircraft, with the NAA Network’s roadmap to enable mutual recognition of certifications, including formal Means of Compliance, performance metrics, and safety parameters.
The roadmap thus provides India with a template for structuring its own certification regime, enabling the DGCA to adapt and align its regulations with global best practices while tailoring standards to Indian conditions.
Such alignment will help several Indian companies exploring eVTOLs attract foreign investment, reduce the need for multiple certifications with US and European civil aviation regulators, and gain seamless entry into global markets. Such broader alignment is also crucial for India to position itself as a manufacturing hub under the Atmanirbhar Bharat vision.
High population densities, traffic congestion, and pollution plague India’s large cities. These urban conditions make air taxis superficially attractive. However, operationalising them requires much more than just aircraft: a robust ecosystem encompassing vertiport infrastructure, air traffic management integration, noise regulation, and seamless integration into local land-use planning and land-based mobility. Unless these disparate conditions merge into systemic readiness, air taxis risk being a technological spectacle rather than a viable mobility solution.
Affordability is another formidable stumbling block. Worldwide, eVTOLs are prohibitively expensive. For example, Dubai, likely to launch the world’s first flying taxis in 2026, estimates a fare of approximately US$95 (AED 350) for a 35-km ride from Palm Jumeirah to Dubai International Airport. In India, this would work out to approximately INR 240 per km, compared to the much more affordable INR 55 per km for a premium aggregator cab. Thus, for a country where relatively affordable public buses struggle for funding and expensive metro systems operate at a loss, investing scarce public resources in air taxi infrastructure raises concerns of prioritisation and equity.
India’s urban local bodies (ULBs) are among the weakest globally, lacking financial autonomy and technical expertise. Air taxis would require seamless coordination among municipal corporations, state governments, DGCA, airport authorities, and private operators, which, at best, seems ‘aspirational’ given India’s fragmented urban governance structures.
Governance and institutional capacity pose other challenges. India’s urban local bodies (ULBs) are among the weakest globally, lacking financial autonomy and technical expertise. Air taxis would require seamless coordination among municipal corporations, state governments, DGCA, airport authorities, and private operators, which, at best, seems ‘aspirational’ given India’s fragmented urban governance structures. Although a few ULBs, including the Mira-Bhayandar Municipal Corporation, have announced early feasibility studies, weak institutional mechanisms make air taxis vulnerable to fragmented decision-making and bureaucratic turf wars.
Air taxi debates also often overlook environmental risks, disregarding the carbon footprint of battery manufacturing, their disposal, and the demand surge on stressed urban grids. Unless directly linked to renewable energy, the anticipated climate benefits of eVTOLs remain vague. Similarly, noise pollution, often underestimated in early-stage pilots, could also become a prohibitive factor in densely populated neighbourhoods.
The NAA Network’s roadmap presents India with an opportunity to align certification standards, adopt shared validation, and incrementally scale air taxi operations. For the DGCA, the roadmap provides a regulatory template to build capacity, while enabling Indian companies to access global AAM supply chains. With regulatory foresight and careful city-level planning, India can position itself as both a testbed and manufacturing hub for AAMs.
Although not a signatory, alignment with the roadmap concurs with India’s deepening partnerships within the QUAD and the United Kingdom, helping it to position itself as an early mover in global AAM governance.
The roadmap, however, has its limitations. Harmonisation depends on trust, technical exchanges, and joint investment in infrastructure. While the roadmap addresses fragmented certification, it leaves the bigger challenge of integrating international frameworks with urban governance unanswered. The coming months and years will determine if the air taxi innovation in urban transport materialises or remains an illusion.
Dhaval Desai is a Senior Fellow and Vice President at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Dhaval is Senior Fellow and Vice President at Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai. His spectrum of work covers diverse topics ranging from urban renewal to international ...
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