Local high school students working to design 'vertiports' for 2 Western Pennsylvania airports

LATROBE, Pa. — The Arnold Palmer Regional Airport sees small planes and even passenger jets taking off and landing on its runway daily. But now, they’re looking towards the future.

They’re having some high school students across the area design something for a vertiport, which is basically an area where an aircraft or a drone that can take off and land vertically can operate.

“We feel it will be a great thing,” said Gabe Monzo, Executive Director of the Westmoreland County Airport Authority, about the potential of having a vertiport at Latrobe’s Arnold Palmer Regional Airport and the John Murtha-Johnstown-Cambria County Airport.

But, what exactly is a vertiport?

“A vertiport is a place where electric aircraft can be stored, get charged up, operate out of, and that’s why we thought the airport would be a good idea,” Monzo told Channel 11′s Andrew Havranek.

Vertiports are kind of like heliports. But, instead of a helicopter, an electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft would use the space. It’s essentially a manned drone, part of a new sector of the aviation industry called advanced air mobility.

All the drone pilots would need is a coordinate, and they can leave the vertiport to get anywhere. Monzo says it could be used by companies like Amazon for deliveries, and even hospitals.

“You start at a hospital where they have life-saving drugs, and they have to go 50 miles away to some coordinate that might be in a field. You can put the drugs or the blood or whatever it might be in the drone and fly it to that point in a safe manner,” he said.

So now, the airports are working with more than 100 middle and high school students in Westmoreland County in their school district’s gifted program to design the vertiport.

They’re going to work on those designs until March, and then the airports will submit them to engineers to see what is feasible.

“This is not an old man’s business,” Monzo said. “This is a young, getting the young people involved in this is absolutely imperative. We’re excited to be in the forefront of aviation and hope that it pans out into something that’s useful.”

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