Aviation 2.0

With the pandemic over, how can our rebooted industry tackle the challenges and embrace the opportunities of a very different world?

In 2022, the aviation industry awakened from its pandemic-induced slumber and immediately had to fend off an almost unending list of problems. Passengers endured the worst delays in history, call centre wait times stretched for hours, and airlines lacked staff – and even aircraft – to meet demand. Yet 12 months on, and with these early teething problems mostly fixed, the sector has found itself restructured into a very different beast than it was in 2019 – and with a decade or more of fresh disruption coming its way.

Now, executives are planning for a future that will include sustainable aviation fuels, drones, new aircraft, and AI radically changing how we fly. Most challenging of all, this will have to be embraced with a new generation of recruits who have been rapidly absorbed into the industry to replace the older talent who left mid-pandemic. It’s something Brett Molesworth, the head of school at UNSW Aviation, has seen firsthand.

“The sector has realised it needs to be a profession and an industry that attracts individuals to prosper, as opposed to what’s occurred before, which is relying on the glamour of aviation, per se,” he says. “Many metaphors, such as boys with toys or shiny aircraft, have often been used to attract people to the industry. But we’ve taken a different approach. Aviation is a business. It’s a commercial activity. And we want to see it thrive. And for that, it needs people with the right skill sets. And hence, it needs to be governed. It needs to be managed if it is to prosper. And it requires professionals.”

It’s for this reason that the team at UNSW Aviation, led by Molesworth, has overseen a holistic review of its programs. This included extensive consultation with academic and professional staff, students, alumni, industry stakeholders and advisory bodies. The result is significant changes to existing management and flying programs, as well as the introduction of a new program in remotely piloted aircraft systems. However, with many of the industry’s challenges still unknown, the focus remains squarely on teaching students to think critically.

“Critical thinking is of significant importance to the industry. We need individuals who can break down the questions they’re provided with and derive an answer based on the ability to dissect the objective or the benefit to the industry – as opposed to just going with your gut. Previously, the smell of av gas came to mind in how people made decisions, and we want to push away from that. We want to make it scientific.” In other words, as the industry moves into 2024 and beyond, it must accept that it must be leaner, smarter, and more adaptable to thrive.

But its most immediate issue is recruitment. The industry faced an underlying lack of talent pre-pandemic, but this was exacerbated by the exit of older talent during the pandemic. It means the industry must rethink how it passes on wisdom to the next generation. Already, Qantas is taking bold steps to future-proof itself with a new engineering academy based in both Brisbane and Melbourne. The program will train up to 300 people each year from 2025 and provide a pipeline of recruits for the Flying Kangaroo and its rivals. In total, Qantas predicts it will need to create more than 8,500 roles in the next 10 years – more than offsetting all its redundancies during COVID-19.

“Unfortunately, during COVID, people did take up opportunities in different industries,” says Louise Woodcroft, group manager for talent and engagement at Qantas. “The opportunity, on the flip side, is that with new people coming into the business, it gives us a chance to bring in new perspectives, diversity of thought and different ideas. We can apply best practices from other industries regarding things like processes, procedures, customer service, marketing, digital and those kinds of areas.”

The changing of the guard, adds Molesworth, is an enormous challenge but one to be tackled slowly. “It’s allowed us to think of aviation as a business,” he says. “This is a real opportunity for us to shape the industry of the future. We have to value an individual’s academic qualifications, and we’ve heard this from many businesses. They can employ individuals who have specialised knowledge, but this knowledge alone in a specialised industry such as aviation is often not enough. So, it’s a large challenge that universities and other professional training organisations have to step up to. There is no quick solution to it.”

One solution that must be embraced is a need to attract more women into the industry. It will be tough, in particular, to fix our shortage of engineers and pilots if we’re not attracting 50 per cent of the population. The industry, though, has made great strides. As the issue goes to print, the CEOs of Qantas, QantasLink and Virgin Australia are all women. It’s a long way from when Deborah Lawrie became Australia’s first female airline pilot only by taking Ansett’s founder to court for the opportunity.

“I find it really encouraging, and I’m very proud of the leaders within the Qantas Group businesses who have demonstrated those career paths are there for young women,” says Woodcroft. “We are starting to see that shift in terms of women who have had the opportunity to develop those skills and the experience to do those jobs and succeed. They’re not just token hires. They have earned them. I think that’s a pivotal point. And it should inspire our young people to go for careers in aviation, whether they’re starting as a ground handler, working in cabin crew, or they’ve always had an interest in innovation and travel.”

A Proud History The UNSW School of Aviation began in 1995 with only 11 students but today enrols more than 500 with a network of 3,000 alumni worldwide. The first aviation program was built on the idea of Professor Jason Middleton, a maths professor covering oceanography. A commercial pilot and aviation enthusiast, he saw a gap in the market for equipping students with more advanced industry knowledge. Within three years, the school had grown so quickly that UNSW acquired its own Air Operator’s Certificate, allowing it to teach pilots without requiring a private provider. Fast-forward to 2010 and it was confident enough to purchase a fleet of Diamond DA40 and DA42s for training, and commission a scanning lidar for its Piper Seminole. In the years since, its secured a  pioneering linkup with Qantas, its own offices at Bankstown Airport, a human factors lab, and CASA-approved air operations to be used for flying training and aerial surveying.

Alongside personnel, the industry must engage with the government to reshape policy, which needs to be updated with the realities facing post-pandemic flying. “Aviation, for better or worse – and frankly, I think it’s worse – is politics with wings,” says Andrew Charlton. “It’s politics in the sky.” Charlton knows more about the topic than most. His CV includes stints as chief legal officer of Qantas before heading government affairs for IATA and working as a lecturer in policy for UNSW. In fact, he’s creating a new course for the university that will tackle how policy is adapting, or not, to the industry.

“It’s not often that the government gets in the way. The government’s been in the way since the start!” he jokes. “How do we, 100 years later, liberate ourselves from some of those incredible constrictions we’ve put on ourselves and had on ourselves since?” The problem, he adds, is that the industry can’t make many changes it would like without the agreement of a multitude of interconnected governments globally. “Our legal structure for aviation is slow, ossified, and cumbersome. Changing the international regulatory framework is fiendishly difficult.”

It comes as aviation policy has become big news in 2023, with both the government’s decision to block Qatar flights into Australia and airport slots attracting mainstream attention. “We need the right people with the right drive and motivation to see change,” says Molesworth. “I’m not sure that we have that at this level. The recent press has certainly alerted the general public to some of the challenges. And we hope that as a motivator, we’ll see that change at that higher political level, too.”

Yet slots and access are just the start of our problems. Soon, traditional aircraft will share the skies with hundreds of thousands of electric aircraft. It’s not a thing of science fiction but a difficulty we are encountering right now. Google Wing delivery drones, for example, launched in Canberra and Logan in 2019 but, in the past year, have graduated from picking up parcels from specialist distribution centres to being able to fly from shopping mall rooftops and supermarket car parks. How on earth, then, will we manage all that extra air traffic in the skies?

It’s one of the questions pondered by Dr Ian Douglas, a former Qantas executive who once chair of the Australian International Air Services Commission was. Alongside being a lecturer at UNSW, he’s also contributing to a book on aviation policy written by Charlton. “We’re not going to be able to do this with one-to-one manual systems,” he says. “And there’s no reason we should be doing what we did in the 1950s in the 2050s. There must be a technological solution to solving this. And it’s it’s going to have to be deployed in a consistent way globally.

“And I think that’s where the challenge comes in. It’s going to be back in the laps of organisations like ICAO and IATA and some of the industry bodies that are going to have to sit down and say, ‘This doesn’t all fit in the system we fly now, and we need someone creative, someone innovative, to come back with a solution.’ The solution won’t be to just hire more people in air traffic control centres. It will have to be some integrated form of airspace management that allows us to fly the current commercial aircraft with the emerging aircraft in the same sky.”

Yet perhaps the biggest hurdle the industry faces is embracing sustainability. In 2021, mid-pandemic, IATA approved a resolution for the global air transport industry to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. The problem is, of course, nobody quite knows how it’s going to get there. “I’m not sure that the industry, at this point, is able to address it,” admits Molesworth. “We don’t know what the future will hold for sustainable aviation fuels and hydrogen. It’s all buzzwords at the moment. In practice, though, I’m not sure we have the knowledge, and the skill sets to adequately apply and manage that.” Innovation and critical thinking, he adds, will be essential to finding solutions.

The industry, though, is forging ahead, even if it’s not entirely sure of its final destination. This year, Qantas and Airbus said they would jointly invest $2 million to help create what will likely be the first sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production facility in Australia. The site in Queensland will transform agricultural by-products, including sugarcane, into up to 100 million litres of SAF annually. Construction is expected to start as soon as next year. More generally, both the Flying Kangaroo and Virgin are set to welcome a new fleet of more fuel-efficient – and therefore environmentally friendly – aircraft.

“Like many industries, we are seeing that the shift to new technologies and jobs that have never existed before is ramping up,” says Woodcroft. “We are collaborating and tapping into the knowledge and passion of our people to set up new project teams to create opportunities for collaboration to explore partnerships around the world with companies, nonprofits or industry groups who are also passionate about bringing innovation to areas such as sustainability and new technology. With our graduate program, we find that people within Generation Z are very used to the rapid technological change and are helping us expedite the changes we need to make to meet the demands we’ll see in the next couple of years.”

Despite a tough few years and hurdles ahead, Molesworth still sees the drive in his cohort of new students – and future aviation leaders. “There is still that passion,” he enthuses. “But it’s for us to convert that passion and use it as a motivation to equip students with the right knowledge and skill sets. That, for us, is the biggest challenge.”

An exciting future

In response to the changing needs of the industry, UNSW Aviation identified an opportunity to conduct a comprehensive review and refresh of its programs to further strengthen its offerings as a global leader in aviation education.

Some of the changes, which will start in 2024, include:

• A full refresh of the program learning outcomes and course offerings for the respective bachelor of aviation in flying and bachelor of aviation in management programs.
• The introduction of a new bachelor of aviation in remotely piloted aircraft systems program. In a world first, this program will include a flight training component of 40 hours of aeroplane flying to a Recreational Pilot Licence level and 40 hours of remote pilot flying, which comprises 20 hours of flight training and 20 hours of commercial experience, as well as a strong core of management and operational courses, to create graduates capable of leading this dynamically evolving sector.
• The introduction of three minor specialisations (optional for students) – human factors and aviation safety, aviation law and sustainability, and aviation data analytics in the bachelor of aviation in management program.
• The introduction of a suite of 12 new courses to be integrated across the revised bachelor of aviation in flying, bachelor of aviation in remotely piloted aircraft systems and bachelor of aviation in management, and complement the holistic approach being taken to learning and teaching in the new UNSW Aviation 2024 education format.