Insights of the citizens perception during a 3-days outdoors flight demonstration

Abstract

Citizens are getting used to seeing more and more drones flying in the sky, but this is still a sporadic situation and it is dif¿cult to experience it in urban environments. The reason is that in low-populated areas the safety regulations are more permissible than in populated areas. With the exception of drone shows, the operations that citizens may observe in urban areas are mainly the ones devoted to security or law enforcement. The CORUS-XUAM project ran six drone flight demonstrations of urban air mobility in seven different European countries. Flights were demonstrated in Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France and Spain. In the case of the Spanish demonstration, drones were flying over the beach of Castelldefels, an urban area in which citizens go for a promenade. This situation was ideal to capture opinions from the citizens not involved in the operations. In addition, the number of flights accounted for 72 delivery operations and lasted three days. As part of the exercise evaluation a number of surveys was collected. From a total of 77 surveys responded during these exercises, 37 corresponded to citizens’ opinions. During the flight demonstrations we also captured the sound pressure and recorded some drone noises. In this paper we will present the citizens’ responses related to noise and will try to find correlations with the captured sound pressure and noise recordings. The results of this analysis can be directly used in the MUSE project to further refine the noise parameters that are perceived as more annoying by the citizens.