June 16, 2016 – For the fifth time, Airbus is challenging students worldwide to innovate for the future of aviation. Fly Your Ideas is a global student competition, designed to establish a strong and lasting relationship between Airbus and the next generation of innovators. Every two years, the competition offers an opportunity for students from across the globe to co-innovate with Airbus on real challenges facing the aviation industry and to develop valuable skills for their future careers. This includes learning teamwork, project management, as well as communications skills.
A new element in this year’s competition is that students are asked to submit solutions to genuine industry challenges that are either innovations for today or for the future.
The key challenges submitted to students are:
Business models: What else could be done with aircraft other than transportation?
Flight operations: How can big data be used to improve efficiency of flight operations?
Passenger experience: How can new processes or layouts ease passenger boarding and disembarking, whilst increasing capacity for luggage?
Design engineering: How can artificial intelligence support aircraft design and/or manufacturing?
Manufacturing: How can manufacturing be optimized to reduce waste and ensure the sustainability of resources?
“With Fly Your Ideas 2017, Airbus offers its innovation expertise to team up with universities and their most inventive students,” said Charles Champion, Airbus’s EVP of engineering. “We value and encourage this type of mutually beneficial collaboration, enabling students to apply their creativity in an exceptionally rich learning environment, and to prepare for a highly-competitive job market. For Airbus, it is an opportunity to nurture new ideas from the imaginative and unrestrained thinking of fresh minds.”
Registration for Fly Your Ideas 2017 is open at www.airbus-fyi.com. Students must register as a team of three to five members. They are encouraged to include team members from diverse nationalities, backgrounds and disciplines – from engineering to marketing and from science to design. Teams must be supported by an academic mentor from one of the students’ institutions. Projects are assessed by Airbus experts and all teams get feedback as early as Round 1. The 50 teams selected for Round 2 get significant input and guidance from Airbus mentors to develop their idea into a detailed project.
Five teams are selected for Round 3, when students are asked to test, prototype or visualize their solutions. The teams present their projects to an expert jury at the final event in May 2017, where the winning team wins a prize of €30,000 and the runners up €15,000.
