Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is progressively being integrated, particularly in urban and suburban areas, providing services such as last-mile delivery of goods. Pilot use-cases of emergency medical assistance by drones have been trialed, and feasibility studies of future passenger air-taxi passenger services have been studies. As integration of these systems is expected to continuously increase, the assessing and understanding of public acceptance towards these new technologies has become a topic of interest in at research and agency level.

Within the frame of the European Union SESAR Joint Undertaking, a research project is ongoing to evaluate factors that influence citizens’ acceptance of urban air mobility (UAM) in the European Union. This project, called ImAFUSA and which stands for Impact and Capacity Assessment Framework for U-space Societal Acceptance, aims at delivering a framework that will help local authorities and other U-space stakeholders and users with the delivery of socially acceptable and beneficial UAM deployment in cities. One of the aspects investigated within ImAFUSA is the perception of safety of citizens when it comes to the operation of drones in urban areas.

Analysis of data focused on four pre-determined indicators: drones flight velocity; drones-to-observer distance; drones-to-bystander distance; drones-to-buildings distance. A fifth indicator surfaced from the responses, namely drone-to-drone path direction.

Overall, the results indicate that participants mostly showed a positive level of perceived safety. A common outcome from all four cases was the initial visual recognition of the drones rather than acoustic recognition, as many participants indicated that the expected noise of the drones was too low and overwhelmed by surrounding noise. It is possible that this factor skewed the perception of safety towards a favourable outcome.