SkyDrive describes a future in which short-hop flights are as ordinary as car journeys, with compact aircraft lifting off from rooftops and parking lots and turning "every corner of the city into a convenient aerial hub." Take that literally and the vertiport map for Osaka looks nothing like an airport map.
The footprint argument
A smaller aircraft means a smaller pad, and a smaller pad means the site list expands from "waterfront land parcels" to "any structurally adequate rooftop." Department store roofs, hotel podiums, hospital helipads and multi-storey car parks all become candidate nodes.
Density beats distance
Urban air mobility does not win on range; it wins on how close the pad is to where you already are. Ten nodes within Osaka's ring beat two nodes at the edges, because the walk-to-pad time is what the passenger actually experiences.
Many pads, one front door
A dense node map creates a discovery problem. Passengers will not memorise pad names; they will search for the category and the city. That is exactly the query pattern a geo-locked category domain intercepts.
The category addresses for this market — evtol.osaka and vertihub.osaka — are currently available; offers can be submitted here.
Source: SkyDrive.