European airline manufacturer Airbus, part of the wider Airbus Group, has launched the 2017 Fly Your Ideas challenge for students around the world. Fly Your Ideas seeks to stimulate co-innovation between Airbus and, where relevant, its supplier companies and universities around the world. “Airbus challenges students worldwide to innovate for the future of aviation,” affirmed company executive VP: engineering Charles Champion at the recent Airbus Innovation Days 2016 aviation press conference in Hamburg. The programme has the status of a formal partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Fly Your Ideas competitions were previously been run in 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. To date, they have involved more than 100 countries (including South Africa), more than 600 universities and more than 15 000 students, while more than 380 Airbus staff have participated as experts, mentors and assessors. The objectives of Airbus for the 2017 iteration of the programme are to have a global competition that addresses real industry challenges, meets high-quality standards, brings ideas to life, creates interactions between students and business, and is marked by diversity in the composition of the teams. “We insist on diversity,” stated Champion.

Five challenges have been set for Fly Your Ideas 2017, all of them genuine issues facing the industry. Each challenge falls into a different category. These categories are business models, flight operations, passenger experience, design engineering and manufacturing. The business model challenge is: What else could be done with aircraft other than transport? The challenge for flight operations is: How can big data be used to improve the efficiency of flight operations? Regarding passenger experience, the challenge is: How can new processes or layouts ease passenger boarding and disembarking while increasing the capacity for luggage? For design engineering, the challenge is: How can artificial intelligence support aircraft design and/or manufacturing? Last, but not least, is manufacturing: How can manufacturing be optimised to reduce waste and ensure the sustainability of resources?

The competition will have four stages – Launch (June 2016, now under way); Round 1: Ideas collection (students, organised in teams, submit their ideas, and Airbus experts provide support), during September; this is followed by an assessment period by Airbus. All teams will get feedback after this assessment, but only 50 teams will be chosen for Round 2: Ideas development, in January next year. Airbus mentors will be assigned to each of these teams. Then, during April and May 2017: Round 3: Final, involving five teams and the creation of prototypes. There will be one winner and one runner-up. The winning team will receive €30 000 and the runners-up €15 000.

Teams should comprise between three and five students and, in addition to diversity in terms of background, they should also be diversified in terms of their disciplines, “from engineering to marketing and from science to design”, in the words of the Airbus press release. Each team must have the support of an academic mentor from one of the student’s institutions. Also in the press release, Champion affirms: “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 future new ideas from the imaginative and unrestrained thinking of fresh minds.”

Keith Campbell attended the Airbus Innovation Days 2016 as a guest of the company.