Community noise from urban air mobility (UAM) and its control by traffic management

Abstract

The awareness about UAM is amplified by steadily growing numbers of air taxi concepts being announced. In general environmentally friendly by electric propulsion, community noise and en-route noise are still prominent open questions. Several studies for larger UAM aircraft, describing the acoustic characteristics of a variety of potential air taxi concepts, have been performed by the author. Due to the abovementioned multitude of different vehicle concepts and their multiple operational conditions, each of them shows individual sound characteristics. Therefore, further investigations of noise created by air taxi fleets appear to be crucial. Understanding of community noise around vertiports and along air taxi routes will strongly depend on those fleets. In this paper, acoustically different air taxi systems are composing different sets of air taxi fleets, used for air traffic noise simulations. The simulations start with baseline scenarios of equally represented taxi systems on fixed flight paths with several flight levels in a certain air lane. The final fleets are consisting of random air taxi composition with randomly populated flight paths. The results, based on common noise metrics and changes in the number of affected residents, could provide a first indication how to reduce community noise by future UAM traffic management.