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?