In the vanguard of change: Cranfield Aerospace

The quaint and sometimes quiet English countryside is still full of air bases left over from World War 2.

Cranfield in Bedfordshire, about 85km from central London and 15km from new town Milton Keynes, is one of those. It’s a place many interested in aviation have heard about, although probably only a few have any true inkling of what goes on there.

It’s about a 20-minute drive from Milton Keynes Central Station, along wide carriageways and skirting seemingly dozens of roundabouts. Then you’re out into muddy terrain, hedgerows and higgledy-piggledy fields, and soon arriving at Cranfield University Technology Park.

Cranfield is still an operational airport with a live runway, having originally been a Royal Air Force base from the mid-1930s.

During the war, Prime Minister Winston Churchill became keen on Britain having an experimental aviation university along the lines of MIT in the United States. Cranfield was considered ideal because it was roughly halfway between Oxford on one side and Cambridge on the other, so there couldn’t be any arguments claiming favouritism from either university.

The College of Aeronautics was opened in 1946, received university status in 1969 as the Cranfield Institute of Technology, and became Cranfield University in 1993.

The airport is now operated by the university with training flights and general aviation flights, and research flights testing new engines and wings, and collecting observations for the UK Met Office.

The university’s technology park is home for more than a dozen global high-tech consortiums, laboratories and companies in the vanguard of sustainability research. They are working with industry to re-think aviation in five, 10, 20, 50 years’ time.

One of these is Cranfield Aerospace Solutions (CAeS), which is developing hydrogen fuel-cell propulsion systems for aviation that they intend to apply to a range of aircraft. Among other clients, CAeS has been keeping Air New Zealand up-to-date as it continues to design innovative, low or zero-emission new aircraft systems which may be useful on regional routes in New Zealand.

As a first step part of that work, CAeS has embarked on Project Fresson – transforming a nine-seat, twin-turboprop Britten-Norman Islander into a craft using their zero-emission hydrogen fuel-cell engines.

Chief strategy officer Jenny Kavanagh, a chartered engineer with expertise in manufacturing and aerospace engineering, explains how the company fits in with the Jet Zero Council work and other UK industry work with government and academia.

We wander over to the hangar where the Islander, proudly displaying the word “hydrogen” in bright green capital letters on its fuselage, is being worked on. The aim is for Loganair to use these aeroplanes on routes to Scottish regional centres after 2027, she says.

“What we’re doing now is phase one. This is about the 250-kilowatt gaseous fuel-cell drive-chain. And we are focusing it on the Islander because it’s a cracking aircraft and we want to take the hydrogen version of it into service.

“From an operational point of view, and also from a technical point of view, it’s a great platform. It’s simple to modify. It’s twin-engined, which has natural redundancy, something important when developing new propulsion technology because there are two engines. It’s non-pressurised. And although it can fly 1200 kilometres in its conventional form, the vastmajority of its operators use it for short hops.”

She says CAeS is talking to four kinds of customers about their developments – operators of Islanders, those operating other small aircraft with between six and 19 seats on sub-regional routes, new sub-regional operators starting up, and airlines like Air NZ not flying anything smaller than a Dash-8 or a 50-seater.

Jenny praises Air NZ for being such a keen and supportive follower of their developments.

“They have no long-term plan of having fleets of little Islanders zipping around the New Zealand regional scene, but what they do see is they want to progress to changing their larger aircraft to hydrogen when the technology is ready. And they are wonderfully foresighted and massively focused on sustainability.

“So, they see that actually introducing these novel small-aircraft technologies much earlier on will help them understand, as an airline, how to operate with hydrogen and electric aircraft in the fleet.”

After about 90 minutes we walk to one of Cranfield’s technology centres, the Aerospace Integration Research Centre, a collaboration between the university, Airbus, Rolls-Royce and the UK Government.

The head of the centre, Mark Aizlewood, shows me round its massive research hangar, one of Europe’s two biggest. There are three Airbus A320 wings in it, an A380 engine, an e-VTOL craft and various other projects under way.

They have a flight simulator, on which they can test how new parts of a plane may affect its flying performance and optimal cockpit design. There are also teaching rooms and another facility a little like a mission-control centre, allowing discrete teams of research staff to sit next to each other but work on different aspects of the design and flight process.

If only Churchill could see what is going on there now.

Aviation writer Paul Gorman visited Cranfield in March 2024.