Utah students aim to tow planes to the gate with a battery-powered, fuel-saving vehicle

Provo • Their four-wheeled contraption had worked perfectly before reporters showed up, Utah Valley University students promised, as they tinkered with it at the Provo Airport.

The creation, a welded frame encased in two wooden compartments roughly the size of coffee tables and powered by two electric engines, was supposed to tow the Diamond DA40 XLT — a single-engine prop plane weighing around 2,500 pounds — hitched to it.

It worked for a minute during its public debut Friday, before a broken sprocket — the metal wheel over which engine chains run — immobilized the machine for the rest of the day. But it would likely be an easy fix, UVU professor and project mentor Brett Stone said, and what is engineering if not a series of problems to solve?

Someone else’s problem, the students chimed in — this is likely as far as they’ll take this project before handing it off to the next capstone class — but a solvable one. And if it works, this student-led invention could revolutionize the airport taxiing process.

This model was just the prototype, a culmination of a school year’s worth of work from UVU engineering and computer science seniors. When it works — which it had just this morning, students repeated — it will be able to tow airplanes to and from their gates, controlled remotely by airport ground crews, pilots and its own autonomous driving abilities.

The traditional taxiing process, Stone said, is noisy, dangerous and wasteful. It requires planes to burn precious fuel and asks tarmac employees to come dangerously close to the spinning blades of aircraft engines.

“Jet engines are meant to be at 30,000 feet,” Stone said. “They’re not meant to push things around on the ground. And so, the way engineers think, I guess, I was like, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’”

The goal is to build a “tug,” as the contraption is called, robust enough to taxi commercial jets — and bring it to market.

Aircraft tugs aren’t new — but fully electric, remote-controlled ones with the capacity to tow a commercial jet could be the industry’s next frontier. There’s a patent application pending for this specific model, Stone said, and future senior capstone classes will help scale it for commercial use. A commercial product could be ready in the next two years, Stone said.

“It’d be really cool to see it progress, to see it reach the full-size Boeing airline capacity,” said UVU graduating senior Kolby Hargett. “I think another year from now, [future students] can get started scaling it into something larger, now that the idea’s here and a lot of the ground work’s done.”

This was a first-of-its-kind collaboration between graduating seniors in UVU’s engineering and computer science departments. Engineers, like Ammon Traden, worked on the design and the mechanics. Computer scientists, like Cache Fulton and Riley Pinkham, figured out the software. Their combined skillset was what it took to turn Stone’s vision into a real, operable product.

“We were blessed that Kolby knows so much about electricity,” Traden said. “He helped us so much with this.”

It’s also the most ambitious capstone project UVU engineering students have undertaken, said professor and mentor Matt Jensen — and the most practical. Students will enter the job market with real-world experience and a demonstrable, physical product they can say they built from the ground up.

“While it’s not perfect, and obviously it did have its challenges today, I think just recognizing ... that they’re about to graduate and go into the industry, I feel very confident that they’ll be good engineers.”

And one day in the near future, the students imagine, they might get to sit on a plane being towed by something they helped create.

“Next, we’re going to come for the plane,” Fulton said.

Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.