London Oxford Airport is plotting a course to becoming a leading UK hub for green transportation, as environmentally friendly aircraft and technologies arrive over the next 20 years. The strategic move, announced at the privately owned airport’s Disruptors Day event earlier this month, marks a significant new path for a facility that has until now been best known as a hub for business aircraft and for pilot training.
To attract aviation technology innovators, Oxford announced that it is investing in a £48 million ($60 million) research and development science park at the entrance to the airport. James Dillon-Godfray, head of business development, told reporters the airport is targeting start-ups and enterprises associated with the world-renowned University of Oxford.
“We decided to take the plunge and build speculatively a green campus environment to provide 17 units with over 200,000 sq ft,” he 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.
One existing tenant looking to be an aviation innovator is aircraft charter and management company Volare. In December 2022, the company ordered up to 20 of the eVTOL aircraft that Lilium intends to start delivering by the start of 2026.
Volare, which was founded in 2013, operates more than 20 business jets and helicopters. It manages most of the aircraft on behalf of private owners with some being made available for charter by third-party customers.
Volare Will Offer Lilium eVTOL Aircraft to Private Owners
Through a new subsidiary called eVolare, the company will be operating the special Pioneer Edition of the Lilium Jet, with a four-seat cabin configuration that is more spacious than the standard six-passenger model. Owners will have the option to customize the cabin with special fabrics and materials with the price for the Pioneer ranging from $7 million to $10 million depending on the interior fittings and other specifications. Volare is marketing the limited-edition aircraft to private owners, including its local VIP customer base, and will also maintain the aircraft on their behalf.
The Pioneer moniker reflects the type’s position as the launch aircraft in the Lilium product line and also describes its target market, according to eVolare’s director of sales, Nick Isbister.
“These are the demographic that have the money to buy this jet,” he said. “With our help, Lilium can build experience operating the product on a low scale before rolling it out to the mass market.”
The eVolare team has been conducting an extensive sales and marketing campaign over the last year to give its VIP clients awareness of the all-electric eVTOL vehicle, which will have a range of 155 miles. It has two full-scale mock-ups of the Lilium Jet, one of which is owned by the airframer.
According to Ibister, the Lilium’s anticipated low noise will give it access to landing sites in the UK where current rotorcraft are not always welcome. An undisclosed number of units have already been sold.
New eVTOL aircraft are just part of the planned new paradigm at Oxford Airport, which is about nine miles from the center of Oxford and 65 miles from the heart of London. Local government officials are working on proposals to establish a hub for other sustainable modes of transport in a corner of the airfield.
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 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 see charter flights with 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.
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.
Electric Aircraft Pose Recharging Infrastructure Challenges
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 will 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.”
