COVID-19 crisis and more recently the conflict in Ukraine have heavily impacted the aviation sector. Have EUROCAE work and standardization activities been impacted?

The current context, with a number of uncertainties, is affecting the aviation industry and is not entirely without consequences for EUROCAE, although I am happy to say that at EUROCAE, activities have not come to a halt during these unprecedented times. Our 50 active Working Groups (WG) have been very busy developing key standards in support of European and global priorities.

Despite this context, EUROCAE sustained and even developed its activities. We even launched some specific activities to support the aviation community’s recovery, such as on thermal recognition of potentially infected passengers, aircraft cleaning and disinfection or handling of infected passengers in air ambulance operations.

Thanks to our effective ways of working and processes and our IT infrastructure, EUROCAE was able to immediately shift all of the standards development activities to be fully online. Whilst the standardisation activities continued with limited impact, the Technical Programme Managers (TPM) team is constantly monitoring to identify potential risks related to the current situation (e.g. delays caused by the unavailability of key experts, inability to hold F2F meetings, priority changes by our members) and coordinating countermeasures in cooperation with the WG leadership to keep these delays to a minimum and well managed.

Another major event, Russia's aggression of Ukraine, is very serious geopolitical situation. In alignment with EU Council Regulation (EU) 2022/328, the EUROCAE Council decided to stop any relation with Russian organisations, an unprecedented decision for EUROCAE. Nevertheless, the impact on the standardisation processes here again is rather limited.

Together with the Secretariat team and the governing bodies, I continue to monitor both of these developments very closely to be able to take any measures if necessary.

I would like to express our gratitude to ENAV and all our members, in the meantime more than 400 organisations and 4500 experts, for your continued support, for actively engaging in the WGs, and developing our standards!

Several changes within EUROCAE have been recently implemented (e.g. new constitution, new legal structure), what are the reasons for those changes and what benefits can we expect?

The legal status project was initiated a while ago with the aim to improve, simplify, and streamline the organisational structure and governance, as well as tax and accounting complexity. Furthermore, this move integrates all commercial activities, which were previously conducted under our subsidiary EUROCAE Communication, such as the training activities, into the EUROCAE Association. This work led to an update of the EUROCAE Constitution.

The new Constitution was adopted by the General Assembly in April 2021 and provides the basis for these changes. The main visible impact of this change was the closure of EUROCAE Communication. All EUROCAE assets and activities are now covered by EUROCAE Association, which remains as the only legal entity. EUROCAE Communication was formally closed in June 2021, and EUROCAE now fully operates according to the new legal structure, all relevant procedures and changes have been completed.

These changes do not have an impact on our members’ status or working group activities to develop standards; these procedures remain unchanged. We believe that we can even better serve our members with this simplified structure.

As new Director General of the organization, what’s is your view on the future challenges for the aviation sector in general and on standardization activities? What are the key priorities for EUROCAE?

EUROCAE has developed immensely over the last years, and I am truly honoured to have succeeded in February of this year to Christian Schleifer as Director General. EUROCAE is an established and dynamic organisation, and we will continue on this journey with the support of our members, partners, the experts in the WGs, the governing bodies and the team at the Secretariat. We have some exciting projects in the pipeline to improve our systems and even better serve our members. Many things are on the horizon, starting from the still uncertain pandemic and geopolitical situations, to building a greener aviation system for the future, regulatory changes, as well as the many amazing technology advances being achieved for example in SESAR. Being at the pulse of all of these, ready to step in and develop the standards needed by the aviation community to strive and meet these challenges of the future will be at the centre of our work.