ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Acoust.
Sec. Acoustic Materials, Noise Control and Sound Perception
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/facou.2025.1624669
This article is part of the Research TopicPerception-driven Acoustic EngineeringView all 3 articles
Human response to eVTOL drone sound: An online listening experiment exploring the effects of operational and contextual factors
Provisionally accepted
- 1Arup Group (United Kingdom), London, United Kingdom
- 2AGS Airports, Glasgow, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Project CAELUS is developing the United Kingdom's first national distribution network using drones for the efficient transportation of vital medical supplies throughout Scotland. Noise is a major barrier to public acceptance of drone networks, yet empirical data on the human response to drones used in a medical context remains limited. This paper presents an online listening experiment designed to collect data on annoyance related to overflight (N = 425) and take-off (N = 278) drone operations for the eVTOL drone used in Project CAELUS. The experiment examines the effects of listener-drone distance, ambient soundscape (remote rural, rural village, urban), and contextual framing (medical delivery vs. no context) on annoyance.Results from aligned rank transform ANOVAs revealed significant effects of all three factors (p < 0.01). Annoyance was found to decrease with increasing distance from the drone and was higher in quieter ambient soundscape environments. Notably, providing contextual information about medical use significantly reduced annoyance, suggesting that the public acceptance of drone networks may be improved through effective community engagement.
Keywords: drone sound, Perception, Human response, Non-acoustic factors, Noise annoyance
Received: 07 May 2025; Accepted: 16 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Woodcock, Thomas, Maldonado, McLeod, Sharp, Hiller and Smith. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: James Woodcock, Arup Group (United Kingdom), London, United Kingdom
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.