Insights of the Citizens Perception During a 3-days Outdoors Flight Demonstration

Citizens are getting used to seeing more and more drones flying in the sky, but

this is still a sporadic situation and it is difficult 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, 36 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