Design-oriented study on the public acceptance of cargo eVTOL aircraft as a revolutionary vehicle concept

The recent active development on eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft has introduced various aircraft configurations and usage into the design space, including those that could have a very different appearance from any existing transportation means to the society. Most especially, logistics application of such vehicle system could give an even more strange impression to the general public, since it won’t directly interact with them, but at the same time will be operated very near the living milieu of civilians. In order to achieve acceptance of such revolutionary aircraft concept from the society, this study conducts a questionnaire survey on the preferable exterior design to citizens not involved in the field of eVTOL development (n=69), based on hypotheses derived from multiple human- and social-science studies. Design hypotheses examined here will include not only on liveries or coloring, but also options of changes on the airframe form, if necessary. As a result, it was discovered that people prefer a passenger-liner-like livery and a roundish form on the airframe. The design principle derived here should contribute orientating engineering towards a market-tolerant product development in the future.