The US Department of Transportation has released the country's first National Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Strategy, together with a companion action plan intended to support the development of AAM operations across the United States.

The announcement, made in December 2025, marks the first time Washington has set out a unified federal framework for the sector, according to Airport Technology, which first reported the publication of the strategy documents.

What does the strategy actually do?

At its core, the package establishes a national policy posture toward advanced air mobility — the umbrella term covering electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, other novel electric and hybrid-electric aircraft, and the airport, airspace and ground infrastructure required to operate them at scale.

The DOT has paired the strategy document with an action plan, signaling that the department intends the framework to function as an implementation roadmap rather than a statement of principles alone. The action plan format implies assigned follow-through across the department's operating administrations, which include the Federal Aviation Administration — the regulator whose certification decisions will ultimately determine which AAM aircraft enter US service.

Why a national strategy, and why now?

Until now, the United States has had no single national strategy dedicated to advanced air mobility, despite the sector's growing visibility among aircraft developers, potential operators, airports and state-level economic development agencies.

The absence of a federal framework has been a persistent point of friction for the industry. Companies developing eVTOL aircraft and urban air mobility services have argued that fragmented oversight — spread across aviation regulation, airspace integration, infrastructure planning and local land-use decisions — slows the path from certification to commercial operations.

A national strategy from the DOT directly addresses that fragmentation claim. By coordinating policy at the department level, the strategy aims to give developers, operators and infrastructure planners a single reference point for how the federal government expects AAM operations to develop.

What are the practical consequences?

The strategy's publication carries consequences across three areas of the aviation value chain:

• Certification and operations: The framework sets federal expectations for how AAM operations will be authorized, positioning the FAA's existing certification work within a broader national policy context.
• Infrastructure: AAM operations require vertiports, charging facilities and airspace access. A national strategy gives airport operators and planners a federal anchor for investment decisions.
• Investment certainty: Developers and operators have long cited regulatory ambiguity as a barrier to capital deployment. A published DOT strategy reduces that ambiguity at the policy level, even though aircraft-level certification decisions remain separate processes.

What remains unresolved?

A strategy document is not a certification. The path to revenue-generating AAM services in the US still runs through type certification of individual aircraft, operational approval of individual carriers, and the physical build-out of landing and charging infrastructure. None of those steps is completed by the strategy itself.

What the document does change is the policy environment around those steps. Developers now operate under a stated national framework rather than in a vacuum, and the accompanying action plan signals that the DOT intends to track and drive implementation over time.

How quickly that framework translates into certified aircraft and scheduled services will depend on the follow-through detailed in the action plan and on the FAA's certification pipeline — the same pipeline the strategy is designed, in part, to support.