Electric aircraft replace refuelling with charging or battery swapping, and this single change cascades through every part of ground handling. Ramp crews today are trained, equipped, and certified around liquid fuel operations — procedures, safety protocols, and turnaround timing all assume a refuelling truck and a fixed set of tasks. Electric aviation breaks that assumption: charging takes longer, battery swapping requires new handling equipment and safety procedures, and some tasks that were manual for decades become candidates for automation in a way fuel handling never was. Airports preparing for electric aviation need to know what ground operations will actually look like before aircraft start arriving, not after.

Key questions to be answered in the project:
1. How does the sequencing of ground turnaround tasks change between a charging scenario and a battery-swap scenario?
2. What new roles, skills, or certifications are needed for ground crews working with electric aircraft?
3. Which existing ground-handling tasks disappear entirely, and which remain but change in nature?
4. Which tasks are realistic candidates for automation, and what would be required to automate them?

In this project we aim to...
- Produce a future-state operations map for a small electric-aviation airport, covering both charging and battery-swap turnaround scenarios.
- Define role descriptions for the ground crew of the future, including new skills and certifications required.
- Identify training and certification gaps against current ground-handling qualifications.
- Build a candidate-tasks-for-automation list with reasoning for each, drawing on aviation ground-handling procedures and heavy-duty EV charging operations as the closest available analogue.