The much-anticipated Higher Education for AVIAtion Professions (HE-AVIAP) seminar has been successfully conducted at the Le Meridien Hotel in Jakarta on the 25th-26th April 2019. This prestigious seminar was jointly organized by IULI and the EASA.
EASA stands for European Aviation Safety Agency and is the aviation authority of the European Commission, which is in charge for rules and regulations regarding aviation and aviation safety. EASA was established in 2002 by the European parliament and the European Council as the European Union needed a central unit to setup rules and regulations for aviation in a consistent way. Before that each EU-country has had its own Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) with own responsibilities and partly own rules. As aviation is international by nature it is evident that aviation needs harmonized rules and regulations all over Europe and beyond. The national CAA´s still exist in Europe, but recently they have reduced responsibilities and tasks.
This was the first seminar or congress on the subject of aviation in relation to education and professions, on this level and on this scope worldwide. It was a great opportunity for IULI to bring together intellectual competence and networking activities.
The overall objective of the HE-AVIAP (Higher Education for AVIAtion Professions) seminar is to explore chances and requirements to integrate the prospective of universities more in education of aviation professions, as currently universities are only partly involved in education and training of education professions. This separation of aviation training from university education has historical reasons and is primarily caused by American tradition as the Americans, which have coined aviation over the last 70 years, still stick in qualification concepts of the past century.
The first day of the seminar day was opened by our rector Dr. Ir. Tutuko Prajogo, followed by a welcoming address by Dr.-Ing. Ilham A. Habibie. Furthermore, a Memorandum of Agreement has been signed between IULI and Sekolah Tinggi Penerbangan Indonesia, followed by three Memorandums of Understanding between IULI and Universitas Dirgantara Marsekal Suryadharma, Universitas Tunas Pembangunan and Politeknik Negeri Batam.
The seminar was rounded off by a presentation by Prof. Nikitakos on the situation in Greece, which as an Island country is facing challenges on the development of aviation to meet future requirements. Finally, the first day was completed by a presentation by Prof. Hamacher, transitioning to the subjects of the second day.
Whereas the first day was dedicated, to picture the development of aviation from industry´s and authorities’ view, the second day of the seminar was designated to show the models, already available at universities and the potentials to enhance these activities. These, presentations, were an exceptional broad scope of internationalization. Apart from presenting IULI´s own model of cooperating education, representatives on executive level from universities from France and Austria as well as from Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Taiwan and Bandung also described their aviation related HE-models. These presentations have shown that Asian universities have already models in use, that are more sophisticated than the traditional models from the US and that there is already a big potential of networking between universities in Asia to promote new models of education & training and to exploit synergies.
“It’s quite interesting to see the different experiences of different organizations, starting from countries which have small roots of aviation and countries which are evolving very fast in aviation and technology.”, Says Emmanuel Isambert, who was the representative for EASA at this event.
Indeed, given the scope of presentations and the people behind, this seminar was an exceptional international event.
