Abstract

Noise disruption is expected to be a significant factor for public acceptance of urban air mobility vehicle operations. Today the noise exposure caused by fixed-wing aircraft and/or helicopters operating from airports can be predicted using the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) software. The noise at the receiver is calculated by interpolating and/or extrapolating noise data as a function of power and distance, named Noise-Power-Distance (NPD) data, for each vehicle type in the AEDT database. The noise data at the receiver fully accounts for atmospheric propagation and includes several adjustments including those for vehicle speed, lateral attenuation, and noise fraction. Urban air mobility will introduce a new class of vehicles named electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL). In this paper, a new tool named “AIRNOISE-UAM” has been developed together with new NPD data named “Gen-1 NPD” to predict noise exposure caused by eVTOL aircraft operations. The predicted noise exposure results from individual flight segments and integrated scenarios are verified with those from AEDT.