Use-case study for a smaller German community and beyond, with realistic traffic scenario and three alternative vertiport locations

Future individual air traffic will be based on air vehicles, such as drones and air-taxis. While drones, e.g., for delivery of goods may be processed decentralized, passenger air-taxis will be operated at vertiports in city centers, e.g., connected to big rail hubs, close to civil airports, but also in smaller communities in the vicinity of larger cities. Here, air-taxi noise—mainly take-off and approach—can impact residential areas inside the community but also in its neighborhood. In cooperation with a midsized community near to Munich/Germany, three potential vertiport locations in the community’s area are investigated under the aspect of noise and potentially related noise annoyance. To create a use-case with results, transferable to similar situations, realistic numbers for daily air-taxi movements between the use-case vertiport and five neighbor cities are included. These connections imply two different types of air-taxis: one tilt-wing eVTOL for the ranges up to 75 miles, and one multicopter aircraft serving on distances up to 30 miles. The UAM noise use-case study is performed for all three vertiport positions, optimized flight paths, and different flight profiles. The results regarding community noise, but also for en-route noise between the neighboring vertiports, are discussed in this paper.