EASA Releases New Report: “Guidelines to Establish the Noise Levels of Drones Below 600kg”

The Euro­pean Union Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency (EASA) released a report this week head­ed, ‘Guide­lines to Estab­lish the Noise Lev­els of Drones Below 600kg’. The aim is to har­monise pro­ce­dures to mea­sure the noise of drones used in the low and medi­um-risk oper­a­tions of the “spe­cif­ic cat­e­go­ry.”

Exam­ples of UAS oper­a­tions under this ‘spe­cif­ic cat­e­go­ry’ include:-

: BVLOS – Beyond Visu­al Line Of Sight.

: When using a drone with MTOM (max­i­mum take of mass) > 25 kg.

: Fly­ing high­er than 120m above ground lev­el.

: When drop­ping mate­r­i­al.

: When oper­at­ing a drone in an urban envi­ron­ment with a MTOM> 4 kg or with­out a class iden­ti­fi­ca­tion label.

Zipline Forg­ing the Way to Reduce Drone Deliv­ery Noise

Drone noise is becom­ing a major issue for the indus­try. As Wing and Man­na Drone Deliv­ery, for exam­ple, expand their deliv­ery tri­als across var­i­ous coun­tries includ­ing Aus­tralia and Ire­land, the more flights, the more pub­lic com­plaints, espe­cial­ly from those who live close to a drone hub or are under a pop­u­lar flight path. While min­i­mal for now, reduc­ing noise is every­thing for the suc­cess of the indus­try as it devel­ops and grows. At present, Zipline is the drone deliv­ery com­pa­ny forg­ing the ‘less-noise way’ by using a new and inno­v­a­tive approach.

The EASA report also expands on a pre­vi­ous pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion phase, after col­lect­ing around 90 com­ments from UAS man­u­fac­tur­ers, oper­a­tors, acad­e­mia and nation­al avi­a­tion author­i­ties.

It goes on, “In addi­tion to the guide­lines, EASA is also pro­vid­ing a tem­plate for a typ­i­cal noise report that appli­cants or declar­ants can use to sub­mit noise data, as well as a self-explana­to­ry spread­sheet assist­ing the noise adjust­ment pro­ce­dures.”

If any­one wish­es to mea­sure and report UAS noise lev­els accord­ing to such pro­ce­dures, EASA ask you to email your data to:-

noise@easa.europa.eu

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.easa.europa.eu/en

(Top image: cred­it — © Haiyin/Dreamstime)