Lisa Wright, Founder and CEO of Landings, doesn’t mince words when commercial real estate professionals ask if they can wait another year or two to think about vertiports. “At the fastest, we could bring a site online in nine months – and that would be incredible,” she explains. “These aircraft are going to be approved within the next nine months. If you’re not on the map now, you’re already behind.”
Wright’s company is building a network of over 2,000 vertiport locations across North America, focusing on rural and underserved markets where traditional aviation infrastructure has never reached. But as Q1 2026 unfolds, the timeline she’s been predicting for years is suddenly compressing into immediate reality.
The evidence is everywhere. China already operates autonomous air taxis with remote pilots flying daily routes. Major electric aircraft manufacturers – Archer, Joby, Beta, and Electra—are moving toward U.S. certification. And perhaps most tellingly, the conversation has shifted from individual flagship sites to entire networks being announced every few days across Miami, Ohio, and Texas.
“Within the last three or four months, agencies have stopped looking at individual sites and started looking at networks,” Wright notes, crediting the new administration and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s approach to advanced air mobility infrastructure. Even public perception has shifted—the “not in my backyard” resistance to drones has notably softened in recent months.
For commercial real estate owners wondering whether their properties could be vertiport-ready, Wright’s team has spent the past months perfecting the answer. Landings recently launched beta testing of proprietary feasibility software that analyzes parcels for vertiport viability, examining everything from size and zoning to energy access, terrain contours, and FAA obstruction data.
The breakthrough came when Wright’s team added portfolio analysis capability. “We can now upload every Prologis location onto our map and run analysis on every one to see if they’re feasible,” she explains. “We can run 500 locations in about 20 minutes to whittle down which ones we’d approach them about.”
The energy challenge Wright anticipated has proven accurate – but also solvable. In meetings with NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority), she’s positioning vertiports as multimodal EV charging centers. The heavy charging infrastructure needed for aircraft works equally well for rural school buses and municipal fleets, creating shared-use scenarios that make projects more viable.
Perhaps surprisingly, Wright sees collaboration, not competition, with traditional FBO operators like Atlantic and Signature entering the space. “There’s more than enough here for us to work together,” she says. “We’ll be the endpoints for their locations, and they’ll be endpoints for ours.”
The technical learning curve has produced real surprises. Battery thermal management, while largely invisible to EV drivers, becomes a primary operational constraint in eVTOL aviation.
High-power vertical flight generates significant heat, and many current eVTOL battery systems require thermal conditioning or cooldown before accepting high-rate charging, adding time and infrastructure complexity. Some manufacturers, notably Joby Aviation, have emphasized tightly integrated liquid-cooling architectures designed to support rapid turnarounds, which may provide a meaningful operational advantage.
Wright’s message to commercial real estate professionals considering 2027 or 2028 timelines is stark: “If you put the first one in, you get to be that test location. If you adopt early, you’re guaranteeing traffic to your location.”
The land rush for vertiport-ready sites isn’t coming—it’s here. The question for commercial real estate owners isn’t whether to engage, but whether they’ll be nine months ahead of certification or perpetually nine months behind.
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