Originally Posted by
petrichor
That's going to be one hell of a motor to pull any aircraft over 150T! The weight and stress added to the gear alone would probably make it unfeasible. As for tugs - when under tow the engineer has responsibility for the process including clearance of obstacles and other aircraft - this would not change, which means you now tie up that person for probably 45mins-1hr per aircraft which is not a good use of manpower.
No, no ! you only need a headset man and possibly a marshaller for the pushback - which is done by the pilots. After the wave off, the pilots taxi the aircraft as they normally do, except using an electric traction motor instead of main engine thrust.
As far as stresses are concerned, the Nose wheel assembly has already been designed and built to be fully capable of taking the full force of towing a max taxi weight aircraft, so it will comfortably handle the push force from the motors. In fact, the motors will be a lot gentler since the motor controller will no doubt have a built in soft start and soft stop, instead of the rough handling of some tug drivers !
The point is you don’t need a tug or a tow-bar, so at busy airports, you save the time involved with disconnecting the tug from the previous aircraft, removing the tow-bar, attaching the tow-bar to the rear of the tug, driving to the next aircraft. disconnecting the tow-bar, attaching it to the aircraft................well, you get my drift. So at busy ramps this could save a lot of time and missed slots.
At airports with long taxi routes and delays, this system could save fuel and CO2.
The system has been built and trialled. Google or youtube WheelTug and you will see.