Fly Your Ideas challenge, an innovative student contest conducted by Airbus, is receiving support from UNESCO. The initiative aims to encourage a new generation of engineers and offer students an insight into aviation world.
UNESCO is supporting Airbus’ Fly Your Ideas challenge
The competition is open for global students and challenges them to create novel ideas for developing a highly sustainable aviation industry. This is the third season of the biennial contest and it involves three challenging rounds. Five teams will move on to the final in the summer of the year 2013 and the winning team will share a prize amount of €30,000. Each team receives support from an Airbus’ mentor during the project development phase. The new feature of this season is that an expert from Airbus will provide guidance at important stages of the contest.
Charles Champion, Airbus’ Executive Vice President of Engineering, stated that through the Fly Your Ideas challenge they like to motivate young people on the aviation sector and the exciting opportunities it offers. He added that the contest provides students from all fields the opportunity to work together in global, multidisciplinary teams.
Airbus invites university students of any discipline, including design, information technology, science, marketing and engineering to participate in the contest. Their proposals need to address the major issues in the industry, which are as follows: community friendliness, passenger experience, traffic growth, affordable growth, efficiency and energy.
Dr Lidia Brito from UNESCO remarked that Airbus provides a rare opportunity for students to apply their classroom learning in real world situations. The Fly Your Ideas challenge is an example for how academia and industry can jointly work to connect the classroom-boardroom separation.