Top PhD-thesis award in air traffic safety

Europe’s most promising young minds in air traffic management (ATM) research were celebrated at the SESAR Young Scientist Award ceremony, which took place during the closing plenary of the SESAR Innovation Days conference in Budapest.

Awarded annually, the prize aims to distinguish young scientists, who have demonstrated excellence in ATM and aviation-related research fields. The award also provides researchers starting out in their career with an opportunity for further professional development. A further objective of the award is to showcase the potential of young talent to formulate fresh ideas and solutions to the challenges facing ATM and aviation.

The top award in the PhD category went to Omar Garcia Crespillo, German Aerospace Center (DLR) & Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), for his work on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/Inertial Navigation System (INS) Kalman filter integrity monitoring with uncertain time-correlated error processes. The jury praised him for a very well structured and written thesis, which demonstrated excellent scientific rigour and innovation in terms of the simulation approaches used to validate and assess the availability and continuity of GNSS/INS systems, taking into account airport locations and aircraft trajectories.

This price came one year after the acceptance of the PhD thesis jointly supervised by Jan Skaloud (EPFL ENAC) and Michael Meurer (DLR).