Scout
Making vertiport planning defensible
Overview
Advanced Air Mobility promised a future where electric aircraft, regional shuttles, and vertiports could become part of everyday transportation networks. But before that future could operate at scale, infrastructure teams had to answer a more basic question:
Where should this infrastructure actually go?
Aerovy’s earliest planning work grew from Purdue research and an internal prototype called AATLAS. The initial system combined commuter flows, demographics, mobility demand, and infrastructure adjacency to identify promising eVTOL vertiport locations.
As Aerovy moved from research into customer conversations, the product problem became more nuanced. Planning teams did not simply need software to “pick the best location.” They needed a way to explore imperfect data, compare tradeoffs, validate pre-selected sites, and turn analysis into evidence that could survive a stakeholder meeting.
I helped design and productize Scout, a geospatial decision-support platform that turned fragmented demand, mobility, utility, and site data into defensible planning workflows for emerging aviation infrastructure.
The Challenge
AAM infrastructure planning was fragmented across GIS tools, spreadsheets, consultant reports, public datasets, and subjective stakeholder judgment. A typical planning team had to consider commuter flows, demographics, income bands, airport and transit adjacency, local POIs, airspace restrictions, zoning constraints, utility territory, substation proximity, and the priorities of airports, OEMs, utilities, cities, and investors.
The deeper issue was not data availability alone. It was trust.
If Scout generated a recommendation without explaining its reasoning, it would feel like a black box. If it only showed raw GIS layers, it would fail to help teams make decisions. The product needed to sit between analysis and judgment.
The core design challenge became:
How might we help infrastructure teams make speculative mobility decisions feel explainable, comparable, and defensible?
Users
Scout served several groups with different definitions of viability:
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Vertiport network developers needed to screen markets, compare candidate sites, and produce evidence for investors or airport partners.
OEM strategy teams needed to understand whether future aircraft networks could connect useful markets, corridors, airports, and customer demand.
Airport infrastructure and electrification teams needed to evaluate whether emerging mobility proposals aligned with real estate, utility capacity, tenant needs, and long-term electrification plans.
Mobility consultants and planners needed repeatable workflows, defensible methodology, and report-ready outputs for client-facing analysis.
Executives and stakeholders needed simple explanations of why a site was promising, risky, expensive, or strategically valuable.
The interface had to be technical enough for planners, but legible enough for non-expert decision makers.
Research and Strategy
Because AAM planning was still emerging, the design process had to create structure before the market had fully standardized its own workflows.
Jobs To Be Done mapping identified core planning jobs: screen a region, identify candidate sites, compare alternatives, validate assumptions, communicate findings, and update decisions as constraints changed.
[JTDB diagram]
Service blueprinting mapped the siting process from regional scan to site validation and report generation.
[Service blueprinting diagram]
This exposed friction around data gathering, stakeholder alignment, methodology repeatability, and handoff to downstream engineering or energy analysis.
A system architecture connected the user-facing workflow to data layers, scoring models, demand estimates, utility proxies, POI analysis, and reporting outputs. Prototype-led customer discovery helped test whether Scout’s workflow matched how airports, OEMs, and planning teams thought about future infrastructure.
The key insight was that Scout’s value lay in transforming disconnected data aggregation and analysis into a shared decision framework.
[PRODUCT SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER — Product Evolution / AATLAS to Scout]
Use a simple before/after product visual or diagram. Show the transition from an academic/research siting model into the implemented Scout planning platform. This can combine an early map/prototype screenshot on the left and the polished Scout interface on the right.
Caption: Scout productized Aerovy’s early AAM siting research into a customer-facing planning platform.
Key Insights
1. Users needed defensible tradeoffs, not a magical answer.
Scout used composite scoring to guide attention, but paired every score with factor breakdowns, confidence indicators, data-source context, and inspectable evidence.
2. Planning starts at the portfolio level.
Scout began with a region and portfolio of candidate sites, then narrowed into site detail, comparison, and reporting.
3. Many candidate sites are already politically or strategically chosen.
The product shifted from “where should we build?” toward “given this location, how strong is the case, what risks exist, and how do we explain the tradeoffs?”
4. Utility readiness was one of the least visible blockers.
Scout treated utility readiness as a first-class planning factor alongside demand, mobility access, airspace, POIs, and site feasibility.
5. POIs made abstract demand feel human.
Scout included POI context so teams could explain what a site actually served: airports, hotels, hospitals, stadiums, business districts, universities, transit hubs, and other trip generators.
6. Reports were not an export feature. They were part of the job.
Scout included report-ready workflows so maps, snapshots, assumptions, comparisons, and rationale could become stakeholder-facing artifacts.
Product Solution
Scout was organized around a planning hierarchy:
Region → Portfolio → Candidate Site → Scenario → Score → Evidence → Report → Handoff
This structure turned a messy siting process into a repeatable workflow.
The Portfolio & Region Explorer let users select a city, airport catchment, corridor, or custom region and review candidate sites alongside KPI summaries, filters, scenario context, and map layers.
[PRODUCT SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER — Portfolio & Region Explorer Detail]
Use a close-up or cropped screenshot of the candidate-site card grid next to the map. Emphasize how sites are sorted, filtered, scored, and visually connected to the GIS layer.
Caption: A portfolio-first workflow let users move from regional screening to site-level investigation without losing spatial context.
Candidate Site Cards summarized each location with a composite score, factor breakdown, major KPIs, warning badges, and quick actions such as Open Detail, Compare, and Add to Report.
The Interactive Planning Map visualized demand heatmaps, POI clusters, utility layers, airspace overlays, transit corridors, and candidate-site markers.
The Site Detail Workspace explained why a site was strong, weak, risky, or worth further validation by showing demand, utility readiness, mobility access, POI context, constraints, score logic, and planner rationale.
[PRODUCT SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER — Site Detail / Score Explainability]
Use a focused screenshot of a selected site detail panel. Show the composite score, factor breakdown, confidence levels, warning badges, assumptions, and source/context labels.
Caption: Every score was paired with visible reasoning so planners could defend a recommendation rather than accept a black-box answer.
The Scenario & Assumption Builder let users compare how rankings changed under different futures, such as commuter-heavy demand, premium airport shuttle demand, high energy cost, or utility constraint stress testing.
[PRODUCT SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER — Scenario & Assumption Builder]
Use a screenshot showing scenario controls, weighting sliders, before/after ranking changes, and map markers updating under a selected scenario.
Caption: Scenario controls made uncertainty visible, letting users compare how assumptions changed site viability.
The Report Builder helped users package maps, charts, site comparisons, assumptions, and recommendations into stakeholder-ready outputs.
[PRODUCT SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER — Report Builder / Stakeholder Export]
Use a screenshot of a report-building interface or report preview. Show a map snapshot, KPI summary, site comparison table, assumptions, written rationale, and export controls.
Caption: Because infrastructure decisions happen outside the software, Scout turned analysis into artifacts that could travel into meetings, partner reviews, and investor conversations.
The Energy Handoff Package connected Scout planning into downstream feasibility work by exporting site boundaries, demand assumptions, utility notes, constraints, and analysis outputs for engineering, energy modeling, or Spectra.
[PRODUCT SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER — Energy Handoff / Bridge to Spectra]
Use a screenshot or diagram showing Scout packaging a shortlisted site for downstream analysis. Include site boundary, demand assumptions, utility readiness notes, risk flags, and export/handoff status.
Scout connected planning to operations by preparing site analysis for engineering, energy modeling, and Spectra.
Key Design Decisions
Map-first, but not map-only.
A map was the natural canvas for infrastructure planning, but maps alone can be ambiguous. Scout paired spatial exploration with structured cards, filters, tables, and score breakdowns so users could both explore and decide.
Transparent scoring instead of black-box recommendations.
Infrastructure decisions are political, expensive, and context-dependent. A transparent score gave teams a starting point for discussion instead of a false sense of certainty.
Portfolio workflow before site workflow.
Planning teams usually screen many locations before narrowing to a shortlist. A portfolio-first workflow matched how infrastructure decisions actually unfold.
POI context as the human layer.
A site near airports, hotels, hospitals, transit, business districts, or event venues could be discussed in terms of real human travel needs rather than abstract demand scores.
Scenario controls as product objects.
Demand, regulation, utility costs, and deployment timelines were uncertain. Scout made assumptions visible and adjustable so users could compare multiple futures without rebuilding the analysis.
Reports as a core workflow.
Infrastructure decisions often happen outside the software. Scout needed to create evidence that could travel into meetings, investor conversations, grant discussions, airport planning processes, and partner reviews.
Impact
Scout helped Aerovy move from research-led mobility modeling into a customer-facing planning product. It translated Purdue AAM research and the AATLAS prototype into an implemented enterprise platform; created a repeatable UX framework for evaluating regions, portfolios, sites, assumptions, evidence, and reports; and consolidated fragmented siting workflows across maps, datasets, scoring, scenarios, and reporting.
The product also supported Aerovy’s investor storytelling by making the company’s planning capabilities tangible and visual. It created demo workflows for airports, OEMs, infrastructure partners, and mobility stakeholders, while establishing reusable design patterns later carried into Aerovy’s broader product ecosystem, including Spectra.
Reflection
Scout taught me that enterprise planning tools should support human judgment, not pretend to replace it.
The most important design shift was moving from a recommendation-engine mindset to a defensible-decision-workspace mindset. In an emerging market like advanced air mobility, the product could not simply tell users what to do. It had to reveal the assumptions, uncertainties, and tradeoffs behind every decision.
That lesson shaped the rest of Aerovy’s product evolution. Scout helped us see that the real opportunity was not only planning future mobility networks, but helping infrastructure operators understand and manage the energy systems those networks would require.
That realization became the bridge to Spectra.
The product also supported Aerovy’s investor storytelling by making the company’s planning capabilities tangible and visual. It created demo workflows for airports, OEMs, infrastructure partners, and mobility stakeholders, while establishing reusable design patterns later carried into Aerovy’s broader product ecosystem, including Spectra.