Flying cars have been a sci-fi staple for almost a century. There is a type of small flying vehicle that is now very close to commercial production. An eVTOL (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) is a new type of aircraft that uses electric power for vertical flight, allowing it to take off, hover, and land like a helicopter without a runway, while also transitioning to forward flight like a plane. These eco-friendly aircraft are designed for urban air mobility (UAM) to reduce traffic congestion, using multiple electric motors, advanced batteries, and often rotors or propellers for quiet, efficient, and potentially autonomous air taxi services.
Here are some of the most likely impacts on the lighting industry.
Vertiports and infrastructure
Vertiports need defined lighting for Final Approach and Takeoff (FATO), Touchdown and Liftoff (TLOF), safety areas, and optional approach path lighting, similar to but distinct from heliports. FAA and emerging vertiport standards specify green perimeter, flood, and approach lights with tight mounting height, spacing, chromaticity, and uniformity requirements, creating a specialized product category for airfield/obstruction lighting vendors.
Aircraft exterior lighting
eVTOLs, like other electric/hybrid aircraft, drive demand for customized, lightweight, low‑power exterior lights (navigation, anti‑collision, recognition, logo, formation) optimized for battery-powered platforms. Market analyses expect growth in exterior aircraft lighting tied directly to the expansion of eVTOL and electric aviation, favoring LEDs and potentially laser or hybrid LED/xenon systems for high‑intensity functions.
Interior & passenger experience
eVTOL cabin-interior studies show lighting already holds the largest revenue share among cabin subsystems, with a 2024 valuation of about USD 34.7 million across emerging eVTOL programs. Operators and OEMs are prioritizing ambient and mood lighting to reduce passenger anxiety and create calming, customizable environments for short urban flights, pushing dynamic, addressable, and color‑tunable LED systems.
Recent eVTOL interior concepts integrate lighting tied to flight phases, soundscapes, and UX features, which drives demand for digitally controlled, software‑definable lighting platforms rather than simple on/off circuits. This aligns aviation with automotive-style HMI lighting trends (scenes, branding, safety cues), creating opportunities for control electronics, drivers, and sensing‑integrated luminaires.
Standards, controls, and power integration
FAA Engineering Brief 105A and related vertiport guidance formalize unique lighting zones, colors, intensities, and control logic specific to eVTOL operations, pushing manufacturers to develop compliant, certified product lines. Academic work on vertiport lighting stresses pilot-controlled, low‑glare, variable‑intensity systems that only operate when needed, opening space for connected, sensor‑driven lighting and advanced dimming schemes.
Vertiports are expected to host 1–2 MW‑class fast‑charging systems per pad, with standards such as ISO/IEC 15118‑1 guiding smart communication and load management; lighting becomes part of a larger electrified, managed infrastructure. As airports and urban hubs plan for eVTOL, electrification initiatives frame lighting alongside high‑power charging, storage, and microgrid controls, creating cross‑disciplinary projects where lighting vendors must integrate into broader power/controls ecosystems.
Broader implications for the lighting industry
Airfield/transport lighting players gain a new subsegment (vertiports and rooftop pads) with high-spec, safety‑critical LED products, while urban infrastructure and façade lighting firms may participate in wayfinding, passenger areas, and landside zones. Traditional architectural and roadway lighting OEMs that can package aviation‑grade optics, certification, and controls will find new project opportunities in UAM corridors, elevated structures, and multimodal hubs.
The need for rugged, low‑profile, low‑glare, digitally controlled LEDs in eVTOL environments accelerates R&D in optics, driver electronics, diagnostics, and IoT monitoring that can spill over into other transportation and smart‑city lighting applications. Conversely, existing advances in LED exterior and smart-city lighting (long life, low maintenance, network control) are directly leveraged for vertiports, shortening time to market for compliant solutions.
Public sources do not yet break out a dedicated “vertiport lighting” market projections, but available vertiport and heliport data enable some projections for 2030–2035.
Related market projections
The global heliport lighting market is projected to grow from about USD 93.6 million in 2024 to roughly USD 139.5 million by 2030, a 6.8% CAGR, with UAM/vertiport use cases highlighted as the fastest-growing segment. Vertiports as a whole are projected in one estimate to grow from about USD 0.24–0.4 billion in 2022–2023 to roughly USD 10.7–11.05 billion by 2030, implying a very high (~60%+) CAGR for total vertiport infrastructure (pads, buildings, systems, charging, ATC, etc.).
In conventional heliports and airfields, lighting (runway/helipad luminaires, beacons, control systems) often falls in the low‑single‑digit percentage range of total airfield capital cost, depending on complexity and whether buildings are included. If vertiport lighting (FATO/TLOF perimeter, approach, obstruction, apron/egress, controls) captures on the order of 2–5% of total vertiport capex, this would translate to a lighting “content per site” that scales with the overall vertiport buildout rather than with aircraft volume.
Taking a 2–5% slice of a USD 10–11 billion 2030 vertiport infrastructure market suggests a potential global vertiport lighting annual market on the order of roughly USD 200–550 million around 2030, assuming sustained buildout and no major regulatory setbacks. Extending the vertiport infrastructure CAGR to 2035 (at a somewhat moderated rate compared with 2023–2030) could plausibly push annual vertiport lighting demand toward the mid‑hundreds of millions of dollars to low single‑digit billions by 2035, but this is an extrapolation rather than a published forecast, and it is highly sensitive to UAM adoption scenarios and regulatory timing.
For planning, treat vertiport lighting as a fast‑growing niche that may reach a few hundred million dollars globally by 2030 and scale further with UAM corridor deployment to 2035. Segmenting by use case (medical/EMS rooftops, city-center hubs, airport‑adjacent vertiports) and by geography (North America, Europe, Asia‑Pacific pilots) will likely matter more to real opportunity sizing than the global aggregate, given that most early projects cluster in a small number of cities and corridors.
More information is available here.
Image above: Courtesy of Joby Aviation.
Image: Courtesy of Archer Aviation.
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