Urban Air Mobility Noise: 2025 Update on Current Practice, Gaps, and Recommendations

Advanced air mobility (AAM) is an aviation concept that involves leveraging emerging technologies, business models, and other capabilities to bring aviation into the regular life experiences of the general public. There is no universally agreed-upon definition of AAM, but it has been described by NASA as “safe, sustainable, affordable, and accessible aviation for transformational local and intraregional missions.” Urban air mobility (UAM) is the sector of AAM that focuses on short-range, “local” missions around metropolitan areas, which have an urban area at their core. UAM is generally envisioned to leverage heliports or novel vertiports located throughout metropolitan areas as airspace access points to provide rapid transportation capabilities, even in locations with extreme road congestion. Along with the many anticipated benefits of UAM, there will be potential noise issues that must be addressed. In 2018, NASA formed an Urban Air Mobility Noise Working Group (UNWG) to assemble noise experts from industry, universities, and government agencies to identify, discuss, and address UAM noise issues.

This paper presents an update to the 2020 UNWG white paper entitled, “Urban Air Mobility Noise: Current Practice, Gaps, and Recommendations [1],” in which a set of high-level goals was developed to address barriers associated with UAM noise that may hamper their entry into service. Much has changed since that paper was published. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to i) develop an updated set of high-level goals, ii) reassess the current practice in the four areas of interest (Tools Development and Experimental Validation, Ground and Flight Testing, Human Response and Metrics, and Regulation and Policy), iii) identify gaps between the current practice and the updated high-level goals, and iv) assess progress on the prior recommendations and make new recommendations to close those gaps. The 2025 high-level goals are presented below. The consolidated set of abridged recommendations for each area of interest is provided in Appendix F, whereas the unabridged versions are provided in Sections 2.4, 3.4, 4.4, and 5.4, respectively.