Hong Kong Students Win Airbus Competition for Revolutionizing On-board Passenger Compartment

Team DAELead from The University of Hong Kong, in Hong Kong has been selected by an expert team of judges as the winners of the Airbus Fly Your Ideas 2017 global student competition. Team DAELead beat fierce competition to win the €30,000 first prize with their effective design for a Private Stowage Compartment (PSC) underneath passenger’s feet.

The final stage of the competition took place this week in Toulouse, France. Five short-listed teams of students – whittled down from 365 entries in Round 1 – were invited to spend a week at the Airbus ProtoSpace facility to visualise, prototype and test their ideas using state-of-theart equipment, before presenting them to a panel of academic and Airbus and aerospace experts.

Team DAELead revolutionize the passenger compartment by fully utilizing the space between the cabin floor and the cargo ceiling to give the passengers their own personal luggage space. The judges were impressed by their vision and skills in seeing such a simple but effective solution for improved passengers experience.

The runners up, team Aquarius from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), in Australia winning €15,000 for their radical concept which turns a commercial airliner into a tool to stop rapid wildfire.

Three students from Indonesia in Team Passex studying at Institut d’Administration des Entreprises – IAE Toulouse, ISAE Supaero and Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile (ENAC), France made it be one of the five finalists on Airbus “Fly Your Ideas” competition.

With their real-time mobile app to assign boarding status to passengers according to their luggage size, they were the first Indonesian students to make it to the finals since 2008, surpassing 365 entries from around the world.

Airbus Fly Your Ideas, now in its fifth edition and organized in partnership with UNESCO, was launched to inspire the next generation of innovators from around the world.

“With Fly Your Ideas 2017, Airbus offers its innovation expertise to team up with universities and their most inventive students,” said Charles Champion, Airbus Executive Vice President 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.”

A record of nearly 5,500 students from around the world registered to participate in the 2017 competition. This year’s finalist teams represent nine different nationalities and eight universities across Africa, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Since the Fly Your Ideas competition launched in 2008, more than 20,000 students from over 650 universities in over 100 countries worldwide have taken part.

For further information, visit http://www.airbus-fyi.com