MassDOT Aeronautics chief DeCarlo: ‘You have now executed on a process that we can make more efficient’ – Part 4
For a state-level agency administrator to say it – it must be so.
“I think of this as a grass roots perspective,” said Jeff DeCarlo, the Administrator of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Aeronautics Division. “Very often, aviation at the state level comes through from top down.”
DeCarlo said his agency discussed in 2015 how autonomous transportation systems were going to change the world.
“Before I met Geoff (Douglass), we had a special conference here in Massachusetts called Aerial Futures of the Third Dimension, where we discussed how we were going to take advantage of the opportunities of these new technologies,” he told the audience at Marshfield Municipal Airport during its October 13 electric aircraft charging station commissioning event. “We had to rethink the way we were going to live as a society around these new vehicles and what they were going to do for society.”
From the Aerial Future’s website: “Increasing congestion and advances in autonomous technology are set to transform how we move around our cities. Many are now looking to the sky — the third dimension — as an expansive space for new kinds of mobility. Autonomous flying vehicles, such as cargo drones and flying taxis, have the capacity to transform how we move goods and passengers around urban space. Responding to these real-world changes, AERIAL FUTURES: THE THIRD DIMENSION examines Urban Air Mobility (UAM), asking how scalable and on-demand UAM models could reduce road traffic, pollution, accidents and the strain on existing public transport networks.”
DeCarlos said he’d been asked by industry folks what would be done about infrastructure and electrification. “We’re going to have electric aircraft – where can we land, where can we take off? Then Geoff calls up.”
Shoreline Aviation manages Marshfield Municipal Airport for the town. Shoreline staffer Geoff Douglass’s story of initiating discussions with various stakeholders about Marshfield going green is told here. The resulting partnership between Shoreline, BETA Technologies, Eversource and MassDOT Aeronautics resulted in BETA installing its multimodal aircraft and ground transportation chargers at the airport. Their formal commissioning on October 13 featured several stakeholder speakers.
Shoreline Aviation President Keith Douglass, left, MassDOT Aeronautics Administrator Jeff DeCarlo, FAA Regional Administrator Colleen D’Alessandro, Eversource VP of Energy Efficiency and Electric Mobility at Eversource Tilak Subrahmanian, and BETA Technologies COO Blain Newton pose with BETA’s ALIA 250 and GATRA’s all-electric bus. Photo courtesy of BETA Technologies
MassDOT Aeronautics oversees 35 of the Bay State’s public-use airports and has been a long-standing Marshfield Municipal Airport partner.
Douglass talked with DeCarlo about informing Eversource, who was needed to run more power down the street to the airport to service the high-powered chargers, about the coming wave of electronic aviation. “Eversource asked what this is all about,” DeCarlo said. “They got it immediately.”
Eversource handled the electricity installation under its Make Ready Program – the company’s EV charging rebate program. That ratepayer-funded program was designed with automobile chargers in mind. The workaround to power an airside charger was to install a roadside charger. Two, in fact, at KGHG – a Level 2 and a Level 3. So now not only can electric aircraft charge up at KGHG, so can electric ground vehicles, such as the all-electric GATRA bus that visited for the commissioning event.
DeCarlo also tipped his hat to the airport’s owner, the town of Marshfield.
“I want to thank the municipality of Marshfield, because this is truly visionary,” he told the audience. “And Geoff and Keith (Douglass, Geoff’s father and president of Shoreline Aviation), thank you very much for all you’ve done to make this happen. What the municipality of Marshfield has done to truly support this is amazing.”
Geoff and Keith executed a process, he said, that can now be made more efficient and optimized – “because everything worked perfectly with your process,” even if this inaugural run took a few years to play out.
BETA Technologies’ ALIA 250 charges up at Shoreline Aviation’s Level 3 charging station at Marshfield Municipal Airport. Photo courtesy of BETA Technologies
One state step was the formation of an Advanced Air Mobility Task Force, busy gathering data about the marketplace. “How is this going to play out in the future, including the reduction in carbon?” DeCarlo said. “How are our communities going to benefit from this?”
Another step, he said, was in setting up a “road map” for the state’s approach to advanced air mobility. The program is being led by MassDOT Aeronautics Deputy Administrator Denise Garcia.
“We’ll have individual plans and projects laid out and we’ll execute on that,” DeCarlo said.
Among them, MassDOT Aeronautics recently received a $2-million SMART grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to plan a smart microgrid that generates and distributes clean, reliable power at Cape Cod Gateway Airport in Hyannis, a federally-designated Historically Disadvantaged Community, facilitating reliable charging of electric ground vehicles and aircraft.
All effort is aimed now at the near future. And results of this are expected sooner than later.
“Keith, do you mind if we borrow your charger once in a while?” he asked with a grin. “Because we’re going to have aircraft flying in here!”
Photos and video are courtesy of BETA Technology.
Come back for more parts to this ongoing series, featuring the insights of stakeholders and proponents of combatting global warming through technological development in aviation.
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