Deerns Outlines Engineering Challenges in Electrifying Airport Ground Operations
Why It MattersAirport ground handling faces a structural shift toward electrified fleets and shared infrastructure, requiring coordinated engineering, load management and new liability frameworks before wider adoption.
Electrifying aircraft stands and ground support equipment is moving from a sustainability ambition to a detailed engineering challenge, according to Deerns senior engineer and project leader Ivar Bal. The firm frames the core objective as reducing fossil fuel use around the aircraft, spanning electric ground power units, preconditioned air systems and ground support equipment such as belt loaders, baggage tractors and electric pushback trucks.
Bal says early decisions in any electrification programme must cover which ground support vehicles to electrify first, which charging port standards to adopt fleet-wide, and how vehicles move between stands, waiting areas and charging positions, warning that unclear handler requirements can produce a technically sound but operationally unusable system. On the power side, Deerns notes that ground vehicles tend to return to charging positions simultaneously, creating high peak loads, and advocates load balancing and battery buffering to avoid oversizing electrical infrastructure.
Fire safety is raised as a separate concern, since battery fires carry unique risks that are hard to mitigate through wider vehicle spacing or fire barriers on congested aprons, while charger installation must be coordinated with terminal, airside and civil works and phased so airports stay operational during construction.
Looking ahead, Deerns points to electric aircraft towing systems that move aircraft toward the runway without using engines as the next step in apron decarbonisation, and raises the possibility of shared or pooled ground support fleets to cut total vehicle numbers at large airports, while acknowledging that commercial responsibility, maintenance and damage liability remain unresolved.
