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Eve Air Mobil­i­ty was busy dur­ing August car­ry­ing out a study on the pub­lic impres­sions of eVTOL noise and the aircraft’s visu­al appear­ance, reports a press release. This analy­sis took place in Orlan­do and New York City. 

The study was to gain the views of poten­tial pas­sen­gers as well as res­i­dents of cities where eVTOLs will fly. The research con­sid­ered two sce­nar­ios. A busier area with high­er back­ground noise and anoth­er with low­er back­ground noise, the lat­ter being clos­er to res­i­den­tial neigh­bour­hoods.

The release explains, “Eve want­ed to under­stand people’s respons­es to both the eVTOL visu­al and sound foot­print by cor­re­lat­ing sound lev­el and char­ac­ter­is­tics along­side annoy­ance per­cep­tion and accep­tance. The study used cut­ting-edge tools to sim­u­late the expe­ri­ence by employ­ing vir­tu­al real­i­ty and aural­i­sa­tion.”

Low noise is crit­i­cal for the suc­cess of fly­ing taxis over crowd­ed cities and conur­ba­tions giv­en how low they will fly over­head com­pared to con­ven­tion­al air­craft. The take-off and land­ing sound at ver­ti­ports con­struct­ed in city areas is even more crit­i­cal.

(Pho­to Cred­it: Eve Air Mobil­i­ty)

As eVTOLs need to oper­ate close to com­mu­ni­ties, this will intro­duce new forms of sights and sounds. There­fore, it is essen­tial to under­stand com­mu­ni­ty per­cep­tions when see­ing and/or hear­ing this new mode of air trav­el from dif­fer­ent loca­tions around a city.

An Eve spokesper­son com­ment­ed, “We believe that by inform­ing com­mu­ni­ties about eVTOL oper­a­tions and learn­ing about their per­cep­tions of this new tech­nol­o­gy, we’ll be able to opti­mise our air­craft design and flight move­ments.”

The spokesper­son con­tin­ued, “Data about per­cep­tions of eVTOL sights and sounds are not wide­ly avail­able. That is why we are part­ner­ing with the Roy­al Nether­lands Aero­space Cen­tre (NLR) to gath­er data that will sup­port inform efforts to improve the com­mu­ni­ty expe­ri­ence of UAM oper­a­tions. NLR has great exper­tise in con­duct­ing noise and per­cep­tion stud­ies.”

Adding, “This visu­al and sound per­cep­tion study is anoth­er key ini­tia­tive of Eve’s design strat­e­gy. We are co-cre­at­ing solu­tions with real peo­ple, so that we can ful­fil future users’ needs and make UAM acces­si­ble.”

We will now need to wait until the study is pub­lished to learn what Eve dis­cov­ered.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://eveairmobility.com/

(Top image: Eve Air Mobil­i­ty)