The influential urbanist Jane Jacobs described Hudson Street, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, as “the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet.” From her window, she watched shopkeepers, schoolchildren, delivery workers, neighbors, and strangers take places in a daily performance that no one had designed. Jacobs was describing the complex order that develops when people understand a place well enough to move within its rhythms. Aviation readers might call it an operating environment. In aviation, however, the complexity of that environment involves risk of collision, loss of navigation and weather impacts. Yet, it’s been mastered with almost poetic precision.
I found myself thinking about Jacobs in July, when I traveled to Tucson to speak at the 2026 Arizona Aerospace Summit. Inside the convention center, hundreds of people discussed advanced air mobility (AAM), autonomous aircraft, test infrastructure, defense, manufacturing, airports and the future of flight. Outside the convention center, the sun and moon set the tempo of another ballet. Residents emerge early, retreat as the midday heat builds, and return as evening softens the light. During monsoon season, storms cool the city and send water through channels that were dry only minutes before, adding a seasonal rhythm that Tucson residents learn to read. This was more than scenery surrounding an aerospace conference. It was a demonstration of one of AAM’s central challenges in Arizona: Will we treat a demanding environment only as something technology must overcome, or can we build systems capable of learning its rhythms?
Arizona’s AAM Operating Environment
During one conference session, Michelle Duquette of Future Flight Global (and AG AMB for Operations) cut through the usual hype with a blunt description of Arizona’s challenge and opportunity: “It’s 115 degrees here. We’re talking about electric aviation.”
Extreme heat adds to the thermal-management burden placed on batteries and electrical systems. High temperatures and elevation also increase density altitude, reducing aircraft performance just as payload, range and reserve margins are being scrutinized. An eVTOL or eCTOL aircraft that performs as expected on a mild day near sea level faces a different operating equation in Arizona’s desert landscape.
The terrain presents another layer. Mountains, canyons and distance can interrupt command-and-control (C2) links and complicate the communications architecture required for highly automated or remotely supervised operations. A test chamber can reveal if an isolated component can survive the heat. Field operations reveal whether the aircraft, energy supply, communications, operator, airport, procedures and mission continue to function as a system.
The desert offers an appropriate comparison for the challenges of AAM that might occur there. Its resilience does not reside in a single plant, animal, rainstorm or adaptation. It emerges from relationships that form among water, soil, temperature, terrain and living organisms over time. AAM might benefit from learning to operate the same way. The aircraft may be the most visible component, but its success depends upon an ecosystem that keeps the entire operation connected.
Arizona has begun putting parts of that ecosystem into law and policy. The enacted text of Senate Bill 1307 defines AAM as an air transportation system primarily using electric aircraft, including eCTOL, eVTOL, and powered-lift aircraft, to carry passengers or cargo in urban or regional areas. It directs the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) to incorporate public vertiports, electric aircraft charging stations and broader AAM infrastructure needs into the State Aviation System Plan. It also allows local jurisdictions to establish locations for vertiports and charging infrastructure in compliance with federal law.
ADOT reports that it has designated an AAM planner and is developing an AAM appendix to the statewide aviation plan. This is important work because an AAM network must consider how new operations fit existing airports and airspace, where electrical capacity is available and how infrastructure connects with the transportation system already on the ground.
Charging alone illustrates the system’s problem. Aircraft duty cycles must be reconciled with charging speed, battery chemistry, cooling requirements, available electrical power, turnaround expectations and emergency response. FAA vertiport guidance notes that the industry has not yet reached consensus on charging and connection standards, and that operators may ultimately use combinations of fixed charging, mobile systems, battery storage and onboard cooling. The question is not how to recharge an aircraft as quickly as possible. It is how to build an energy system that supports the mission safely, reliably and repeatedly under local conditions. Local conditions in Arizona differ from those in Los Angeles or New York City.
Resilience Beyond The Test Chamber
At the event, the Arizona Technology Council and the University of Arizona explicitly promoted the state’s “unmatched test environments” and “real-world proving grounds.” The description fits. Arizona offers the aerospace industry heat, elevation, varied terrain, major metropolitan areas, remote communities, military ranges, airports, universities, manufacturers and active drone operations within a single state.
Yet a proving ground can teach more than whether a machine survives punishment. People who live in the desert do not deny its severity, but they rarely speak about it as an adversary. On the contrary, they speak of their home with a unique affection. They know when to move, what to carry, where to find shade and when conditions require a different plan. In this environment, determination does not mean continuing on schedule regardless of what the landscape demands. It means knowing when to launch, when to wait, when to reroute and how much reserve the mission truly requires.
Arizona’s infamous monsoons make these concepts visible. For aviation, this is more than metaphor. Monsoon rain, extreme heat, outflow winds, dust and rapidly changing visibility affect dispatch, routing, energy reserves, landing sites, communications and ground infrastructure. A resilient AAM system must do more than withstand the worst condition recorded during a test campaign. It must recognize changing conditions, adapt its operations, recover when the environment interrupts the plan and remain dependable across seasons. In other words, AAM must move with the rhythm of the landscape.
Arizona’s human history deepens the point without taking us away from aviation. Tucson has what UNESCO describes as the longest agricultural history of any city in the United States. The Arizona State Museum documents generations of Indigenous innovation involving crops, wild plants, soils, water, canals, reservoirs, trade, and settlement. Those systems were impressive because they emerged specifically for a particular place and its patterns of scarcity, heat, rainfall, and distance. Their relevance to aerospace is that Arizona’s history offers repeated evidence that durable technology emerges from sustained attention to the environment in which it must function.
Arriving At The Reality Of Place
Aerospace is preoccupied with time. We measure speed, range, endurance, turnaround, production rates, development cycles and time to market. We speak constantly about the future, usually while competing to reach it first.
Indigenous scholar and philosopher, Vine Deloria Jr., offered a useful warning: “If time becomes our primary consideration, we never seem to arrive at the reality of our existence in places.” For AAM, this truth is consequential. A development schedule can tell us when an aircraft may be certified or when a vertiport could open. It cannot tell us whether the proposed operation fits the landscape, infrastructure, missions and daily life of the place it intends to serve. Reaching the future first is not the same as arriving well suited to serve within the ecosystem.
Arizona’s varied ecosystems are dynamic. Phoenix presents extreme heat at an immense metropolitan scale. Tucson combines Sonoran Desert conditions with aerospace, defense, research and airport capabilities. Prescott adds elevation and an established aviation-education ecosystem. Northern Arizona introduces forests, snow, altitude, and long distances. The Four Corners presents sparse infrastructure, remote communities, difficult terrain and missions far removed from an urban air-taxi route. A system suited to one of these Arizona hubs may be poorly matched to another.
Duquette described the state’s scattered centers of expertise as “pockets of goodness” that need a thread woven among them. She repeatedly returned to the idea of interoperability. This idea exists not only among aircraft and technical standards, but among regulators, legislators, airports, manufacturers, infrastructure providers, communities and the landscape.
Arizona can extend that idea one step further by pursuing interoperability with place. Testing would examine not only whether an aircraft tolerates heat, but how its mission, energy demand, noise, schedule, infrastructure and operating procedures fit the region where it will fly. Timing would reflect daily and seasonal rhythms that have guided life there for millennia. The answers would differ by mission. An urgent medical flight cannot wait for the pleasant part of the day, while a routine delivery network may have far more freedom to adjust its schedule, route, payload or reserve requirements.
No technology has completely conquered the conditions in Arizona. For millennia, people have learned how to move within its rhythm. Aerospace has spent more than a century learning how to overcome gravity, distance, and time. Arizona offers another frontier, to develop aircraft and operating systems sophisticated enough to understand the places beneath them.