EVERETT – Boeing Co. engineers have come up with an electrifying idea that could slice airlines’ jet fuel bills.
Their concept: install electric motors in the nose landing gear of jets so they can drive around airports on their own, without the aid of expensive tugs, and without having to use their jet engines to taxi back and forth from runways.
Preliminary tests on an Air Canada 767 earlier this year proved the idea works, said Bill McCoskey, the lead engineer on the project, which was done by Boeing’s Phantom Works research unit in Seattle.
The goal is to help airlines cut costs, he said.
“Everybody’s focused on higher, faster, farther – fuel burn in the air,” he said. “But up to 44 percent of an airline’s total operating costs are incurred on the ground, not in flight.”
Today, Boeing airliners get from the runway to the gate using power from their jet engines. To back away from a gate, they get a push from a “tug” – a heavy duty ground vehicle that can maneuver a jet back and away to a place where the pilot can use the jet’s engine power to steer.
There are drawbacks, said Jim Renton, McCoskey’s boss.
Running jet engines on the ground means burning fuel, as many as 70 to 80 gallons per takeoff-and-landing cycle, Renton said. With aviation fuel prices soaring jet-fast, there’s plenty of incentive to find ways to use less.
“If fuel was a dollar a gallon, we wouldn’t be talking about it,” he said.
There’s also a pollution issue, Renton said. Government agencies around the world are cracking down on emissions from airplanes, and “there are certain airports in certain parts of the world that are really up against it.”
Reducing the amount of time jet engines run while on the ground would help, he said.
Time is also a factor. In many cases, pilots find themselves waiting at the gate with fully loaded planes for a tug to push them back. If the planes could push themselves back, it would save time, perhaps allowing for more flights in a day. And airlines would be freed from having to buy expensive tugs and train workers how to use them.
McCoskey said the idea of putting small engines in the nose gear of planes has been kicked around for nearly four decades. The problem has been that there wasn’t a viable way to do it, he said. “Electric motor technology was not adequate to supply the torque.”
But in the past decade, “multiple technologies converged,” McCoskey said. New generations of electric motors and onboard electrical generators became available.
The only question remaining was how to integrate them. McCoskey’s idea was to use the engines to put power to the nose landing gear, so that it would be both the steering and the drive wheel, sort of like a tricycle.
There was debate about this, he said; people didn’t think there would be enough traction with the front wheel. But the tests proved that “you could in fact drive a fully loaded airplane of the 767 size.”
Where does it go from here? That depends on the airlines, Renton said. Boeing won’t start installing it on airplanes unless airlines want it, and before that happens, “they’ve got buy into it that there’s a benefit to them,” he said.
If they are interested, then Boeing would develop a detailed design, but it’s likely going to be years before that happens, Renton said.
Still, McCoskey said, “All the airlines we’ve approached so far have seemed really positive.”
He sees great potential for airlines to save money.
“We have a piece of fat juicy fruit here,” McCoskey said. “It has a tremendous potential to produce a lot of juice for the customer.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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