Electric Green Taxiing System Quietly Enters Paris Air Show

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Honeywell and Safran have teamed up to create EGTS International, a company that makes Electric Green Taxiing Systems for airliners.  Honeywell has extensive experience with auxiliary power systems and Safran makes “world-class landing gear systems.”  Put them together and you have the self-powered landing gear which made its public debut at the Paris Air Show this week.   Others have been working on the same type of system, but  EGTS is the first to show the technology off at an air show. Besides making the display Airbus A320 one of the quietest airplanes moving across the tarmac at the show, the system could save airlines up to four percent per flight on fuel burn.  As the EGTS web site explains, “Because an aircraft’s main engines are optimized for flying rather than taxiing, they burn a disproportionate amount of fuel during ground operations. With a short- or medium-range aircraft spending up to 2.5 hours of its time on taxiways every day, …

Several Groups Now Testing Electric Taxiing

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation 3 Comments

It must at least seem like a good idea, because three different enterprises are taxi testing Airbuses with electric landing gear wheels meant to replace the large “tugs” that can be seen every day at airports around the world pushing jet airliners away from their boarding ramps. In current normal practice, the jets, with their engines at idle, are pushed onto a taxiway, at which point the tug disengages and the jet throttles up to begin the usually long taxi to a waiting runway. Quirkily capitalized easyJet, the United Kingdom’s largest airline, is working with Honeywell and Safran to develop and test their version of this new technology, which they label the electric green taxiing system (EGTS). EGTS-equipped aircraft can taxi without the use of their jet engines by using the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) generator to power motors in the main wheels. Electromechanical actuators on each of the aircraft’s powered wheels and what would need to be fairly-sophisticated motor …