Low-Altitude Economy as a System-of-Systems: A Review of Concepts, Enabling Infrastructure, Operational Scenarios, and Governance Pathways

Abstract

The low-altitude economy (LAE) is evolving from a policy-driven concept into a multidisciplinary research field spanning low-altitude airspace governance, unmanned aircraft systems, eVTOL platforms, public air routes, vertiports, digital traffic services, industrial applications, and social acceptance. However, existing knowledge remains fragmented across Chinese LAE studies and international urban air mobility, advanced air mobility, drone logistics, and airspace-management literatures. This review adopts a PRISMA-informed structured narrative protocol to synthesize representative studies published between 2020 and March 2026, and argues that LAE should be understood as a system-of-systems rather than as a relabeling of drones, air taxis, or general aviation modernization. The article makes five contributions. First, it clarifies the conceptual boundaries among LAE, general aviation, the UAV economy, and UAM/AAM. Second, it positions LAE against prior ecosystem, socio-technical, and transportation system-of-systems frameworks. Third, it develops and operationalizes a five-layer framework linking airspace resources, vehicles and manufacturing, physical and digital infrastructure, operational scenarios, and governance-based value realization. Fourth, it synthesizes key enabling conditions, including public air-route networks, UTM–ATM convergence, vertiports, cybersecurity, edge intelligence, digital twins, certification, and social legitimacy. Fifth, it compares scenario-specific deployability across mobility, logistics, public-service, industrial, environmental-monitoring, and regional-accessibility applications. The central conclusion is that LAE scalability will not be determined by aircraft innovation alone; it depends on coordinated readiness across infrastructure, regulation, digital observability, operational value, resilience, and public trust.