In today’s world, air travel is all about efficiency, speed, interconnectedness, and universal accessibility. Aviation has certainly been at the forefront of innovation, becoming one of the world’s safest and most trustworthy means of transportation nowadays. However, because new times constantly bring new obstacles, it is time to rekindle the debate and consider how Aviation might overcome hardships.

The Air Navigation Convention is already a well-known event in the world of aviation, having reached its 12th edition. This international event is organized by a group of students of the Air Navigation Section within the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, eager to facilitate interaction and fruitful communication between students, alumni, teachers and, last but not least, top companies in Romania and abroad in the aerospace field.

This convention has a one-of-a-kind theme that is relevant to what is going on in Aviation in 2021 and in the coming years. This year’s conference concept and subject is “Aviation Emerging Challenges: Innovation and Coping with Change”. The 12th edition of the event took ​place between 14th and 16th of April 2021, when the attendees joined us on Zoom in a delightful tour of the hottest topics of the industry at the moment.

The subjects discussed in the first day are related to the means by which the aviation industry has long sought technology advancements that would improve the economic, operational, and environmental aspects of flight, mainly by reducing the influence of CO2 emissions to up to 3 or 4 million tonnes per year.

We were excited to welcome AIRBUS Safety Specialist Francesca Popescu, EUROCONTROL MUAC Environmental Expert Ilona Sitova, Antonio Licu – the Head of the Safety Unit at EUROCONTROL and AirNav Alumnus Victor Ciulei to share their insight into the topic of “Making Aviation Greener”.

The themes presented on the second day of the event centered on how Automation in Aviation must be implemented properly in order to serve the public’s rising expectations, particularly in the waning days of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the reintroduction of the Boeing 737 Max model to the commercial fleet.

We were thrilled to have Peter Hendrickx – the Head of ATM Development at EUROCONTROL MUAC, DFS Ergonomist/Human Factor Expert Nils Tavares Schader, ATQP/EBT Manager and Type Rating Examiner B737 Capt. Sebastian Allgaier and Senior ATM Consultant at Think Research Diana Toma join us to discuss the subject of “Automation & Digitalization”.

The final day was a promising one, full of insights into unmanned aircraft and their impact on Air Traffic Management.The presentations were meant to widen our horizons and perspectives and revolved around safety implications and general impacts of drone implementations.

The last day’s features were with Retired UK NATS and Former Head of Safety & Regulatory Compliance Safety Services Roger Dillon, Drone Unit Expert at EUROCONTROL Anastasiia Sobchenko, the CEO of RAS Aviation Dorin Ivaşcu,  Senior Air Traffic Control Expert Duane Dupon and Former Head of Safety Regulation Unit Peter Stastny, who offered a detailed explanation on the subject of “New Entrants in Aviation”.

We are grateful to our sponsors, The Frequentis Group, an international supplier of communication and information systems for control centres with safety-critical tasks, and Regional Air Support (RAS), a Romanian professional aviation services company, who have worked tirelessly to make this convention, as it has been for the past 12 years, a huge success.

Last but not least, we would like to express our appreciation and acknowledge the contributions of the Alumni Politehnica Aerospace Engineering Association, whose major goal is to facilitate connection between alumni and current students with the intention of assisting the latter professionally and delivering advice on their future career.

The Aerospace sector brings people from all around the world together on a regular basis. It also serves as a platform for individuals to cooperate and share ideas. This has also been the purpose of our event, which has proven to be one of the most successful editions so far, despite the challenging circumstances under which it was held.

On behalf of the whole Air Navigation Convention Organizing Committee, we would like to thank all of our speakers, teachers, mentors and sponsors for their assistance, and, of course, all of our attendees for their participation over the three days, and to invite them to participate in the future editions.