Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers new opportunities for parcel delivery in metropolitan areas, but its success will depend on public acceptance. Among the societal challenges, privacy concerns represent a particularly sensitive issue that has received limited attention compared to noise or visual pollution. This paper applies privacy-related performance indicators, developed within the MUSE (Measuring U-space Social and Environmental Impact) project, to a simulated case study of parcel delivery in Madrid. Two operational concepts are analysed: free-route airspace and a grid-based network. The indicators capture the population potentially exposed to drone operations and provide a structured way to assess how different airspace designs influence privacy. The results show that the grid-based network consistently leads to higher exposure compared to the free-route concept. For individual trajectories, the number of affected people is more than doubled in the grid-based case. For aggregated traffic, the grid-based network yields approximately double the values during morning operations, while the difference is less pronounced during afternoon peaks. Given that results show grid-based networks may double privacy exposure, these findings highlight policy implications, calling for integration of privacy indicators, balanced altitude rules, and continuous monitoring in U-space regulation to ensure socially acceptable and sustainable UAM deployment.
Ganić et al. (Thu,) studied this question.