There is a growing interest for so-called urban air mobility in the future, which may increasingly make use of small airborne taxis, usually 2- or 4-seated electrically driven aircraft. The aerospace industry, but also new technology companies are showing a more and more awareness for this potential market, and several concepts for such light air vehicles are already existing: Some of these air taxis are already flying on a demonstrator level, some are still in a stage of design study. All of them are making use of electrical or hybrid-electrical distributed propulsion, consisting of rotors or propellers - in some cases counter rotating - or fan jets. Additional noise generation may be also appearing due to specific installation effects. In any case, the propulsion sources will generate predominant noise, which will be important for the later assessment of community noise in the vicinity of air taxi hubs, but also for the expected en-route noise due to rather low flight levels. The future noise situation in the communities, potentially coming from this new urban individual transportation, has not yet been discussed in detail since there are no reliable noise data available for the different air taxi vehicle concepts. Sufficient information on hub locations, number of operations and flight path routing is also not available or discussed yet. But both are crucial for the environmental noise assessment. This paper is giving a description of a first assessment study, established on the basis of a simulated air taxi scenario. This scenario describes several hubs in the urban area of a larger German city. Those hubs are to connect urban regions of specific interest. The paper gives a detailed description how the study will be covering the most important aspects for a later modelling and mapping of community/en-route noise and its assessment.
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