ATEFA - A first German approach on UAM community noise and air-taxi certification

Abstract

Urban air mobility (UAM) includes larger air taxis, driven by multiple distributed propellers or fans, installed in a fixed configuration or as tilted wings/engines. These novel electric air vehicles will always generate tonal and broadband noise, in some cases with components from a specific installation situation. In any case, noise will propagate to the ground, into high populated areas of large cities or into their urban environment, individually depending on the operational situation of air taxi use. Some of the populated areas, where no significant noise from air traffic has been observed so far, will be exposed to this new type of aircraft noise. ATEFA, as the first German national funded research project on UAM community noise, aims to provide first answers. Three selected air taxi concepts, strongly differing acoustically from each other, will be technically described and their noise emissions will be modeled and predicted. Air taxi operations will be simulated by generic traffic scenarios in a selected area of southern Germany, and community noise near vertiports, but also "en-route" along the flight paths, will be computed. Beside this, noise certification aspects will be assessed regarding metrics and procedures and compared to a light low-noise helicopter as reference aircraft.