Less than a quarter of German residents agree to use of air taxis for passenger transport, study reveals.

A sur­vey which asked 1,000 peo­ple liv­ing in Ger­many how they feel about the use of air taxis has revealed that only 21 per cent agreed they should be used for gen­er­al pas­sen­ger trans­port.

The Tech­nis­che Uni­ver­sität Berlin (TU) and Wis­senschaft im Dia­log (WiD) cre­at­ed The Sky Lim­its Project, which aims to iden­ti­fy the chal­lenges pre­sent­ed by unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles.

From 2019, TU and WiD have received fund­ing for a com­pre­hen­sive tech­nol­o­gy assess­ment study on drones for par­cel and pas­sen­ger trans­porta­tion from the Ger­man Min­istry of Research and Edu­ca­tion. The results of its pro­jec­t’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive atti­tude research were pub­lished just two weeks after the Min­istry of Trans­porta­tion revealed the Fed­er­al Government’s Action Plan on Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tems and Inno­v­a­tive Avi­a­tion Strate­gies.

The Sky Lim­its Project com­bines lit­er­a­ture analy­sis, atti­tude research and the use of par­tic­i­pa­to­ry for­mats with experts and mem­bers of the pub­lic — and aims to cre­ate a basis for dis­cus­sion and devel­op rec­om­men­da­tions for prac­ti­cal action on the part of politi­cians, plan­ners and the com­mer­cial sec­tor.

The research was car­ried out in two stages: first, it focused pri­mar­i­ly on exam­in­ing the population’s atti­tudes towards deliv­ery drones and air taxis and assess­ing the extent to which indi­vid­u­als would use these. In Autumn 2019, WiD and TU Berlin com­mis­sioned the opin­ion research insti­tute to run five focus groups in Berlin, Erfurt and Stuttgart in order to gain an ini­tial qual­i­ta­tive insight into the opin­ions of the pop­u­la­tion.

The project team then car­ried out a tele­phone sur­vey of 1,000 peo­ple from 20th to 29th Jan­u­ary, 2020.

Sum­maris­ing the results, it says: “The research results as a whole show that the pop­u­la­tion is scep­ti­cal with regard to deliv­ery drones and air taxis and that most peo­ple would rather not use them per­son­al­ly. The results also clear­ly show that aspects such as envi­ron­men­tal friend­li­ness and safe­ty are par­tic­u­lar­ly crit­i­cal for most respon­dents. At the same time, major doubts are appar­ent in rela­tion to poten­tial job loss­es and the noise and stress caused by deliv­ery drones and air taxis.”

But despite the gen­er­al­ly adverse atti­tude for their gen­er­al use, the major­i­ty of par­tic­i­pants approved of the use of air taxis in med­ical emer­gen­cies, such as rapid deliv­ery of med­i­cines and trans­port­ing patients to hos­pi­tal.

Eighty two per cent of respon­dents said it was either impor­tant or some­what impor­tant that air taxis were envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly, and almost two out of three found it some­what impor­tant or very impor­tant they would no longer need to wait in traf­fic jams. About one in two felt it was impor­tant that air taxis would save them time and their use would be inex­pen­sive.

Sev­en­ty five per cent cent of respon­dents also said they would find it bad or very bad par­tic­u­lar­ly often when it came to noise. And a sim­i­lar pro­por­tion said the same in regards to air taxis block­ing their ‘unin­ter­rupt­ed view of the sky’.

To view the sur­vey results, vis­it https://skylimits.info/ergebnisberichte-umfrage-englisch/