Rex Alexander, the founder and president of Five Alpha LLC, is arguably “the” global authority on vertical flight infrastructure. With decades of hands-on aviation experience spanning military service, emergency medical flights and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) with Uber Elevate, he now addresses critical gaps in heliport and vertiport design and standards, with a relentless focus on harmonization and safety.
In a recent Dawn of Autonomy podcast, Alexander shared his thoughts on how lessons learned from the helicopter community bridge over to the electric vertical take off and landing (eVTOL) crowd, recent progress on vertiport standards and what else the community needs to do to elevate the infrastructure so critical to the future success of advanced air mobility (AAM).
From Rotor Blades to Regulations: Rex Alexander’s Aviation Evolution
Rex Alexander’s aviation roots run deep. He began flying at the age of 14, earned a degree in Aeronautics with a major in aviation management and a minor in aviation maintenance from Parks College of Saint Louis University, and later served as an Army aeroscout helicopter pilot and instructor pilot. His career trajectory—from McDonnell Douglas inspector to offshore oil-and-gas pilot and Helicopter Air Ambulance (HAA) operator—grounded him in the realities of vertical flight.
For Rex, a pivotal moment came in 1996, when a poorly designed hospital heliport in Indianapolis caused a catastrophic rotor strike during startup, which destroyed the copter’s blades and vertical fins. This incident ignited his current mission: infrastructure safety cannot be an afterthought.
“Architects designed that particular heliport with a zero understanding of wind dynamics, turbulence, or rotor blade physics,” Alexander recalled. “It was a wake-up call—aviation infrastructure demands expertise, not guesswork.” And so, Five Alpha was born in 2019.
Five Alpha’s Origin: Bridging the Infrastructure Gap
During Alexander’s tenure as Uber Elevate’s Head of Infrastructure, Alexander quickly recognized that the nascent eVTOL industry had infrastructure blind spots. He founded Five Alpha, after leaving Uber, to tackle systemic risks in vertiport and heliport design. Uber was his first client.
“Urban environments are unforgiving,” Alexander explained. “We’re building infrastructure where turbulence, downwash, and human error collide. Safety isn’t optional—it’s existential.”
Five Alpha’s niche lies in mitigating hazards like downwash (airflow forced downward by rotors) and outwash (horizontal gusts after the downwash impacts the ground), which have caused injuries and fatalities globally.
A tragic United Kingdom (U.K.) downwash fatality at Derriford Hospital provides a sobering example of the risks that Five Alpha seeks to address in vertical flight infrastructure. In that incident, the powerful downwash from a landing Sikorsky S-92A search and rescue helicopter fatally injured an elderly woman as she walked through a public car park alongside the hospital’s helipad. The downwash also seriously injured another bystander.
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report revealed systemic shortcomings in helipad safety management, including a failure to adequately address the risks posed by helicopter downwash to people in nearby public spaces. This fatality led to national reforms in the U.K. and has, in a more broader sense, become a touchstone in the conversation about vertical flight infrastructure safety.
The Heliport Safety Crisis: The Top 3 Shortfalls
The U.K. helicopter fatality highlighted the critical need for comprehensive risk assessment, robust data collection and clear operational protocols. Among other things, Alexander uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling and wind tunnel testing provided by other experts to predict and neutralize these types of risks.
He also addresses risks associated with vertical flight infrastructure holistically through advocacy, standards development, and educational initiatives. Among these risks, he ranked these three systemic failures high on his list of those that the industry must urgently address:
1. The Invisible Data Void
Unlike bird strikes or runway incidents, downwash-related accidents often go unreported. Without robust reporting mechanisms for infrastructure-related incidents—much like the systems that track bird strikes—regulators and industry leaders lack the information and data necessary to drive meaningful safety improvements.
Alexander calls for the establishment of national reporting frameworks and better integration of infrastructure data into the FAA and NTSB accident investigation processes, checklist,s and safety management systems. “There’s no mechanism that tracks these events,” Alexander noted. “Without data, regulators and designers fly blind,” he said.
2. Pilot Education’s Missing Chapter
Helicopter training manuals omit heliport criteria and safety. “The word ‘heliport’ doesn’t even appear in the FAA’s helicopter flying handbook,” Alexander noted.“Pilots don’t know what good versus bad looks like because we’ve never taught them,” he continued. Instead, pilots learn through trial and error, unaware that a painted “H” on a building or in a parking lot may not meet any of the FAA’s standards for heliports and will often contain dangerous design flaws. Through collaboration with Vertical Aviation International (VAI) and their new Vertical Flight Infrastructure (VFI) Industry Advisory Council (IAC), Five Alpha, along with other industry experts, are working to draft a new curriculum that emphasizes infrastructure literacy.
3. Accident Investigations Overlook Infrastructure
When crashes occur at infrastructure, investigators routinely cite pilot error, not poorly designed infrastructure. Alexander cited cases where, what he referres to as “helicopter traps”—tight, obstruction-rich, turbulent landing environments—were ignored in official reports. He works closely with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Transportation’s Safety Institute in Oklahoma city to train FAA and NTSB teams to assess infrastructure culpability to ensure lessons learned lead to tangible change. “Until we get the lessons learned and identify the problems, we can never fix the problems. We just seem to keep repeating the same exact problem,” he explained.
The shortfalls Alexander has witnessed in the Copter world have yielded a set of hard-earned lessons he believes can help shape the future of vertical flight.
Hard-Earned Wisdom: Filling the Oversight Gap
Besides the need to fill the critical gap in pilot education and to systematically capture and learn from infrastructure-related incidents, Alexander emphasized a key gap in regulatory oversight that exists between public and private-use facilities.
The FAA exercises authority over public-use heliports and vertiports, but has little to no jurisdiction over private-use sites. This means that over 99% of the nation’s 6,180 heliports currently on record with the FAA operate largely outside of federal oversight. Private-use facilities are not eligible to access federal airport improvement planning (AIP) funding, nor do they benefit from FAA airspace protection. Instead, their safety and compliance depend largely on state and local zoning, easements, and the diligence of individual owners.
This lack of oversight is especially acute when it comes to medical-use and hospital heliports. While nearly all helicopter air ambulance operators conduct commercial operations under Part 135, all of the medical-use heliports they serve are classified as private-use. This puts them outside the FAA’s jurisdiction and enforcement authority—even though these sites are critical for emergency response and public safety.
While the FAA’s own Airport Data Information Portal (ADIP) online database shows there are 2,675 ‘Medical-Use’ heliports, which may or may not be colocated at a hospital, experts like Alexander estimate that as many as 2,000 hospital heliports are unaccounted for in federal records, with some studies suggesting a deficit of up to 3,471 unregistered sites. This discrepancy not only complicates airspace management, especially as drones and AAM operations proliferate, but also means that many hospital heliports are not built or maintained to any consistent federal safety standard.
State and local regulations, as well as accreditation standards from organizations like the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Systems (CAMTS) and the National Accreditation Alliance of Medical Transport Applications (NAAMTA), may fill some gaps, but the result is a patchwork of oversight that varies widely by jurisdiction.
In some states, compliance with FAA Advisory Circulars and national fire and building codes is mandatory for hospital heliports, while in others, oversight is minimal or nonexistent. This fragmented system increases the risk of accidents, exposes communities to hazards, and can even threaten the continued operation of vital medical transport services if a poorly designed or maintained heliport leads to a serious incident or community backlash.
For Alexander, the lesson is clear: the current system’s lack of comprehensive oversight and data collection for private-use and medical-use heliports is a critical vulnerability in the nation’s vertical flight infrastructure. He continues to advocate for reforms that would bring greater accountability, standardized safety practices, and federal recognition to these essential facilities to ensure that lifesaving air medical operations are supported by infrastructure that is as safe and reliable as the missions themselves.
Standards in Motion: Shaping the Future of Vertiports
And so, Alexander also lends his voice to modernizing vertiport standards. Many architectural and engineering firms, he noted, approach heliport and vertiport projects with a two-dimensional mindset, failing to account for airspace, turbulence, and the effects of downwash and outwash. Security teams may not understand the importance of keeping people clear of landing zones, and pilots may not realize that just because a site is marked as a heliport is no guarantee of safety or compliance.
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And so, he continues to work with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to merge its Heliport Design Advisory Circular and Engineering Brief 105A into a unified Vertical Flight Infrastructure guide, targeted for launch in 2026. Updates include:
- Performance-based criteria: Tailoring designs to aircraft capabilities (e.g., power-to-weight ratios) rather than rigid dimensions.
- Short-field takeoff/landing (STOL) integration: Addressing hybrid aircraft that blend short runway and vertical operations. (*Read that again – this is a big one, folks!)
- Global harmonization: Aligning U.S. standards with ICAO and European frameworks to streamline international operations.
“The FAA is working diligently to prioritize performance data from eVTOL manufacturers,” Alexander explained, “they just need more cooperation from those same manufacturers.” “The FAA’s current goal is that by the end of 2025, we have a better performance-informed blueprint for both traditional helicopter and eVTOL aircraft that will allow us to account for all types and variations of vertical flight infrastructure.
Teaching the Next Generation: Rex Alexander’s Educational Crusade
Alexander’s commitment to aviation safety extends far beyond infrastructure design and regulatory advocacy. He remains a passionate educator, frequently sharing his knowledge across the vertical flight industry. Leveraging his decades of experience, he has become a leading figure in teaching not just pilots, but also regulators, accident investigators, engineers and industry leaders about the intricacies and risks of vertical flight infrastructure.
Alexander serves as a platform instructor for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Transportation Safety Institute (TSI) in Oklahoma City, where he helped develop and now teaches advanced courses on heliport evaluation and accident investigation techniques. His four-hour course on heliport accident investigation is now a key part of the advanced rotorcraft accident investigation curriculum that FAA and NTSB investigators attend. His efforts have led to the integration of infrastructure-specific data fields in accident report forms and the inclusion of infrastructure analysis in official investigation protocols.
His educational influence extends well beyond the United States. Alexander speaks frequently and leads workshops at major industry gatherings, including the Vertical Flight Society’s (VFS) Forum 81, the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture, the National Fire Protection Association’s conferences, and international summits such as the Dubai Helishow. At these events, he consistently emphasizes the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration: “Architects, engineers, and pilots must speak the same language,” Alexander said. “Urban air mobility won’t scale without trust.”
In addition to formal courses and conference presentations, Alexander is a prolific writer and thought leader. He regularly publishes articles, white papers, and technical guidance on topics ranging from heliport and vertiport standards to risk management and accident trends. (In fact, he’s the Infrastructure Ambassador to Autonomy Global!)
Alexander’s educational crusade is not just about imparting knowledge—it’s about changing the safety culture of the industry to prevent accidents and build public trust.
Infrastructure Grounded in Safety Principles: The Cornerstone of Air Mobility
For Alexander, the path forward is clear: standardize, educate, innovate. As he reshapes global infrastructure, one vertiport at a time, he continues etching his legacy in every safe landing—and every life saved. We’re at a tipping point,” he said. “eVTOLs promise cleaner, faster transit—but only if we build ports that are safe, not just shiny.”Connect with Rex Alexander: Follow “Mr. Infrastructure” and Five Alpha on LinkedIn for insights into vertiport design.
By: Dawn Zoldi