London Oxford Airport has set its sights on becoming a leading UK hub for green transportation, as new environmentally friendly aircraft and technologies arrive over the next 20 years. The privately owned airport announced the initiative during a recent “Disruptor Day” conference, where head of business development James Dillon-Godfray mapped out the airport’s infrastructure projects and development goals.
“There is a proposal from local government to establish a transport hub in the corner of the airfield, which will host all forms and modes of new sustainable transport,” said Dillon-Godfray. Oxford Airport is about nine miles from the city center and 65 miles from the heart of London.
Dillon-Godfray believes the long-term project, which has an initial budget of more than £23 million ($29 million), largely to develop the ground transportation infrastructure, will be a boon to the airport and help secure its survival well into the future. “We have the opportunity to integrate the ground network with air transportation solutions, including regional commercial services, with the hubs next to one another on the west side of the runway.”
There is also an opportunity to put a vertiport nearby. “It will all be integrated with new-generation electric aircraft and models using different versions of sustainable fuel,” said Dillon-Godfray. “It could potentially be one of the greenest commercial airport solutions in Europe and that would be the angle that we would go for, as we could eventually tick all of those boxes here.”
London Oxford, which made its name as one of the UK's prime locations for flying schools, began diversifying around 15 years ago under its owners Reuben Brothers, which also owns the London Heliport in Battersea. It opened a VIP terminal, promoting its ease of access to both London and the affluent Cotswolds region to operators and high-net-worth individuals. It also started to develop a business aviation cluster while offering office and hangar space to MRO and other service providers including Excellence Aviation, P3, and Volare Aviation.
In 2022, it secured Cat 6 fire capability, which allows it to support narrowbody airliner-size aircraft, including a Boeing Business Jet managed and operated by Volare. “We also see routinely for charters the Embraer 195 and Airbus A320 and we can now provide the requisite fire and rescue support for them,” said Dillon-Godfray. Also in the last year, London Oxford installed a parallel taxiway at the top end of the runway, which has “vastly improved” the efficiency of the airport and has opened up a new part of the airfield that can be developed.
Key anchor tenant Airbus Helicopters will open its new UK headquarters on the site in the third quarter of 2024, marking 50 years since the company launched operations in the country. Located on the west side of the airfield, the £50 million facility will boast seven helipads, each designed to support Airbus’s largest, heaviest helicopter types, as well as 66,000 sq ft of hangarage and 59,000 sq ft of offices, stores, and workshops.
Meanwhile building work on a research and development hub will kick off in January 2025. Dubbed the R&D Science Park, the £48 million project—located at the entrance to the airport—is designed, said Dillon-Godfray, to attract “start-ups and spin-outs from the University of Oxford’s ecosystem” as well as next-generation aviation. “We decided to take the plunge and build speculatively a green campus environment to provide 17 units with over 200,000 sq ft,” Dillon-Godfray explained.
“Around us today, there are many companies involved in the same new technologies that aviation is adopting and utilizing, such as battery research [Williams Advanced Engineering], hydrogen fuel development [JCB], and electric motors [Yasa],” he noted.
London Oxford will begin offering sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) next year, following demand from its anchor tenants and visiting operators. “We are later to SAF than our peer airports [notably Farnborough and Biggin Hill] but with momentum growing significantly, we cannot ignore it,” said Dillon-Godfray.
While sustainability and green technologies are pivotal to London Oxford’s future, accommodating the new generation of electric aircraft poses a major challenge, largely due to the charging requirements.
“All the vertical takeoff aircraft electrical power sources require significant volumes of power for a fast charge,” Dillon-Godfray said. “Manufacturers are talking about anything from about 400 kVA (kilo-volt amperes) to 600 kVA and in some cases about a megawatt of power supply for a fast charge for one machine at one time.”
To put this in perspective, Dillon-Godfray said the airport had to wait three years for the local power distribution network organization to deliver 500 kVA in power from its nearby substation to power three hangars. “One electric aircraft needs exactly the same power as that to recharge in 15 minutes, so you are talking about a massive amount of juice, which is simply not available at Oxford or, increasingly, around the country.”
Furthermore, the cost of getting the supply from the grid to the middle of the airfield is prohibitive. “To get that thick copper cable, buried underground, from the substation to a charging point is [today] around £1,400 per meter," Dillon-Godfray explained. "So, if we're paying for that, we're going to want to charge the operator quite a lot of money to get a good return on our investment for the power that they're going to suck out of that supply.” That cost in turn is going to be passed on to the customers.
Worse still, there is no commonality in the charging requirements for these new electric vehicles. “Airports and heliport operators are not going to fit 10 different systems,” admitted Dillon-Godfray. “It’s going to be something as simple as a common 125-amp socket delivering 90 kVA, but instead of it taking 10 minutes to charge your electric vehicle, it’s going to take an hour.”