Urban air mobility

Dear #EUROAVIAns, today we’ll give a quick look to what is considered the future of urban life, and a solution to everyday problems with mobility in urban areas 🏙.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) consists in the use of flying vehicles to mobilize people and cargo in a quick and efficient way. Flying in urban areas means facing several difficulties. Pollution is always present, so environmentally-friendly solutions, like electric vehicles 🔌, have to be prioritized. Providing cities with such transport service is translated into finding solutions for cities that may not be adapted to host all the needed infrastructure, therefore companies are looking into VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) aircraft 🚁.

A problem that may go unnoticed is acoustic pollution. Everyone is familiar with the hammering sound of the blades of a rotor 🔊. Such noises must be avoided in urban areas, and that’s why last September, NASA conducted research on the noise impact of a VTOL drone during all phases of its flight. Noise has an objective component which is how microphones capture it, and a subjective one on how the listener perceives it. The objective component was studied, and several vehicles were analyzed. For instance, both Airbus and Volocopter, companies developing Urban Air Mobility solutions, decided to design their aircrafts with a great number of small rotors to reduce the level of noise.

This is how a greater future for cities looks like, and we’ll be part of it.

Article by @ghisellinielia, member of the Communication WG.

[Picture: Airbus]