A New Metric for Characterizing the Socioeconomic Impact of Noise Pollution from Proposed Urban Air Mobility Operations

Urban air mobility (UAM) represents a promising frontier in transportation, yet concerns over its potential contribution to noise pollution are increasingly undervalued or, at worst, disregarded. Aircraft noise and the associated annoyance have been linked to adverse health impacts, such as hearing loss and heightened anxiety in those who face high exposure. Additionally, the psychological effects of disproportionately affected groups enhance the feeling of existing inequalities. This paper seeks to reduce the probability of ill-planned air traffic management by distilling the relationship between proposed UAM aircraft operations and human activity and proposing a new community annoyance noise metric derived from current regulations, population density, and land use. More holistic in nature, this metric can better inform implications for public health and quality of living in lower-income and racial minority communities that are traditionally subjected to heightened aircraft noise due to their proximity to airports. A trade study of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area was undertaken to demonstrate the utility of this new metric and the application of this work. Three distinct electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft configurations were modeled to simulate hourly operations between theorized vertiports. The findings suggest that for direct vertiport-to-vertiport flight operations, the degree to which specific demographics of people are impacted varies with configuration.