Golden Triangle Regional Airport is now home to Mississippi’s first electric charging station for aircraft.
The charging station was unveiled Monday morning near the airport’s Avflight office. It is poised to increase the airport’s versatility with hosting and supporting different kinds of aircraft.
“We’re really excited about it because it’s another option when it comes to supporting advanced aviation and aircraft,” Matt Dowell, the airport’s executive director, told The Dispatch. “Electric aircraft are in development right now (and) being certified. We like to have as much infrastructure to support aviation as possible.”
Golden Triangle Regional Airport partnered with Avflight, a fixed-base operator, and Beta Technologies, a Burlington, Vermont-based electric aerospace company, to bring in the charging station. Beta has 18 charging stations throughout the country, including a recent opening in Montgomery, Alabama. Fifty other stations are in development.
Dowell said the market for electric aircraft is still quite small, but the airport will now have the infrastructure to support them as the market grows. He said one of the factors important to the airport was to ensure the infrastructure could be used by multiple aircraft manufacturers and operators. As a result, the charging stations are not exclusive to Beta aircraft, opening them for use to other electric aircraft.
“We see that as anything that gets manufactured, we hope in the future will be able to use that same charging station infrastructure that exists at the airport now,” he said. “… If you need fuel, we’ve got it. If you’re flying electric aircraft, we have the infrastructure to support that as well.”
The charging station includes two chargers, one inside the fence that will primarily be used for aircraft and another outside the fence primarily for electric ground vehicles. The chargers are visually similar to fuel pumps at a traditional gas station. The charger used for aircraft is a level 3 fast charger, while the charger available to the public for vehicles like cars is a level 2 charger.
Beta has a phone application for interacting with both the aircraft charger and the ground vehicle charger. Two spaces are now active for ground vehicles and can be used by anyone who needs to charge their car. All that is needed are the app and a method of payment.
Dowell said one of the important factors of the charging station was to ensure its growth potential.
One of Beta’s prototype aircraft, the ALIA CTOL (conventional take-off and landing), was parked Monday at the Avflight hangar as an example of the kind of aircraft that can use the charging station. It has a 50-foot wingspan and has a total flight capacity of 7,000 pounds. The aircraft has a top speed of 120 knots, or 138 miles per hour.
“This one only flies conventionally,” said Emma Davis, a flight test engineer with Beta. “We take off and land on a runway.”
She said the CTOL and other prototypes are pending Federal Aviation Administration certification for commercial flights. For now, the aircraft is used for cargo transportation and logistics. Beta has partnered with UPS and United Therapeutics Corporation for deliveries such as organ donation transport.
“The whole picture is, there isn’t the charge station infrastructure out there for electric aviation, so someone’s got to do that,” she said. “If we want to fly our aircraft throughout the country, what’s the best way to do that? It’s to have a charge station that we’ve built (and) implemented in place.”
The CTOL is completely powered by electricity, and the airport’s new charging station can fully charge it in about an hour. The plane has five internal batteries and can fly for about 2 1/2 hours before requiring a charge. Its longest completed trip is 386 miles – comparable to what the flying distance would be between GTRA and Augusta, Georgia.
It takes only about $50 to fully charge the CTOL. It would take several hundred dollars, depending on the mission, to fuel a traditional aircraft of comparable size.
“That’s significantly cheaper than spending hundreds of dollars on aviation fuel depending on how much you need,” Dowell said. “There is a cost savings when it comes to actually powering up the aircraft.”
For now, Dowell said the airport expects the ground vehicle chargers to be used far more frequently, as Beta’s planes are still in the prototype phase.
“We expect as more of those aircraft get certified by the FAA, we’re going to start seeing more visits,” Dowell said. “You really have to have the infrastructure first – kind of like Tesla did. In order to sell the aircraft, (Beta) have to be able to have places they can go to charge and utilize the aircraft that they’re purchasing.”
Kevin Edwards is news editor and reports on Starkville and Oktibbeha County government.
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