Burlington FBO Leaves Competition Green with Envy

Heritage Aviation officially opened its environmentally green FBO at Burlington International Airport, in the Green Mountains of Vermont, last Thursday evening. FBO president Chris Hill rhetorically asked assembled guests, “In this business, how can you be green?” He answered by describing the ecologically responsible design elements that architects TruexCullins–the Burlington firm that counts Ben & Jerry’s headquarters among its projects–incorporated into the Leed-certified (leadership in energy and environmental design) 79,000-sq-ft facility. This includes one of the largest green roofs in New England and a parking lot made with pervious pavement that allows water to be absorbed into the ground rather than channeled into storm drains. Rainwater collected in a 30,000-gallon tank is used for washing airplanes. After working closely with the FAA to ensure it posed no risk of interfering with aircraft guidance signals, Heritage Aviation is also the first GA facility in the U.S. to have a community-scale wind turbine on site; it supplements solar panels. Hill told AIN that Heritage expects its annual energy consumption from the grid to be in the region of 600,000 kilowatt-hours instead of the one million kWh it would consume without the wind and solar power-generating equipment.