Dr Graham Dorrington: Airbus started a competition called Fly Your Ideas in 2009. It runs every
two years and the idea is to foster innovation in their industry and bring new ideas that could
be useful to promote sustainability, and for the future of aviation.
Dale King: So Fly Your Ideas is a student challenge. The idea is that we're inviting
student teams from around the world to think about ways in which we can make the aviation
industry more sustainable, more eco-efficient. And we're asking students to develop ideas,
and promote and develop those ideas with us. We set up a structured competition to enable
them to do that.
Tim Conroy: My project is ALMA, Affordable Liquid Methane Aircraft. We are proposing
a transition of fuel from traditional kerosene fuels to liquid methane, which is a cheaper
and more carbon efficient alternative.
James Herringer: What we're trying to do here is prove the feasibility of applying a cryogenic
fuel into a wing fuel tank using a PC-9 Wing. We're using liquid nitrogen instead of methane,
so liquid methane as a proposed liquid fuel, and we are using liquid nitrogen instead as
it is a less dangerous gas, less flammable, easy to work with - it's at a lower temperature
which sort of means that if liquid nitrogen's feasible, then liquid methane is.
Stephanie McMurray: PIES is Personal In-seat Entertainment System and what we're proposing
is that instead of the current in-flight entertainment systems, what would happen is people would
bring on board their own iPads or tablets and be able to mount them on the back of the
seat. There's a keyboard that shines down onto the tray table, and then all of the media
which is currently available would just be streamed to your own device, so you'd still
be able to watch all the movies, TV shows, even look at the in-flight magazine all on
your tablet.
Dale King: It's important for Airbus for a variety of reasons. Some of the ideas we might
pick up and take forward, some of the students may ultimately come and work for us, but what
we really want to do is we want to get the best and the brightest students in the world
excited by working in aeronautics and thinking about the future of our sector.
Three of the teams are from RMIT, and we're really looking forward to working with them,
and we wish them the best of luck.
Dr Graham Dorrington: International competitions like this are really valuable because they
make students aware of the broader context of their education - how they fit within the world,
as it were, and what their future careers could be, and it makes them recognise that
the world does need innovation and change and they can contribute to that. They're not
just a hopeless cog in the system, they can make a real difference - and there's somebody
listening to them. There's an opportunity for them to really come up with exciting and
innovative ideas which could potentially make the world a better place.