UAM Community Noise Impact Studies

Abstract

There is increasing interest in urban airspace mobility (UAM or AAM), which essentially refers to two- or four-seated, electrically driven air-taxis. Due to their expected operations, populated areas will experience this new and unfamiliar aircraft noise. Because of their novel design and operating concepts, their noise characteristics differ remarkably from those of a conventional aircraft. Therefore, aspects of noise impact on affected residents around vertiports and resulting community acceptance of air-taxis come into the focus of research. At the same time, most residents have little or no idea what air-taxi operations will look, or sound like in reality. Acceptance predictions based on acoustic metrics for single flight events, such as sound pressure levels perceived on the ground or equivalent sound pressure levels across a period of time, are speculative. This circumstance represents an uncertainty factor for developing the emerging UAM industry and must be addressed. One central part of the Bavarian State Ministry-funded project PAULA specifically addresses the question: How are air-taxi noise and scenarios across a certain number of operations at various observer points perceived and judged by the population? Laboratory studies using distributions of audio sequences of flyovers and fly-bys, synthetically made audible, can provide the answer to this question. This paper focuses on an overview of the project’s methods, used in the noise impact studies.