Hackathons and innovation challenges are always exciting, but it becomes more so when the event is global, industry specific, and the participants are industry experts. AVIATIONVSCOVID19 was just that. I was fortunate enough to take part in this event and to be a part of a wonderful team of aviation professionals, and our team was the third winner of the innovation challenge.

This 3 day innovation challenge was different at so many different levels starting from the process of selecting less than one fourth of the applicants for the challenge and random, yet balanced team assignments done by the coordinators themselves,  to the design thinking focused approach to innovation that all the teams had to go through.

Our team was assigned the “in flight” area for innovation, and we came up with an idea of a mobile app “Flight Buddy”, that could be useful to instill confidence in the passengers’ minds. The ideation and prototyping process followed the design thinking methodology and it was so enriching. This also gave me the opportunity to connect with a lot of experts in various areas within avaiation and also to experience the design thinking ideology first hand.

Below is our pitch video for “Flight Buddy” that won the 3rd place as well as was presented at the FTE APEX Virtual Expo in December 2020. The video was created by myself, using open source images and footage and music and voice over done by my fellow team mate.