Industry feedback required after launch of new survey to define future diverse workforce within urban air mobility

A co-oper­a­tive project has been launched in the urban air mobil­i­ty indus­try to cre­ate its first Diver­si­ty, Equi­ty and Inclu­sion (DEI) pro­gramme.

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with P3 Tech Con­sult­ing, Women and Drones and the Diver­si­ty Devel­op­ment Net­work of Cana­da (DDNC), the com­pa­nies seek to under­stand the cur­rent DEI bench­mark by obtain­ing feed­back through a sur­vey, which went live on Fri­day and will close on August 27th.

In future, the project hopes to devel­op a sec­tor white paper and iden­ti­fy resources to sup­port busi­ness­es with­in the unmanned air­craft sys­tems (UAS) and urban air mobil­i­ty sec­tors, and help their DEI devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion.

A press release announc­ing the sur­vey said: “The poten­tial short­age in engi­neers alone could set the indus­try back years. We need to inspire a diverse tal­ent pool to enter into this and relat­ed aero­space career fields, and then retain that tal­ent.

“That’s exact­ly what Women and Drones, whose net­work brings togeth­er women from around the globe to con­nect and suc­ceed in the Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tems (UAS) and Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) indus­tries, hopes to do.”

The sur­vey fol­lows on from a recent thought-pro­vok­ing com­men­tary by Mike Hirschberg, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor at the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety, who talks about the impor­tance of diver­si­ty in this sec­tor and the need for an addi­tion­al 10,000 engi­neers this decade.

And ear­li­er this year, Iskwew Air — a mem­ber of the Cana­di­an Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Con­sor­tium (CAAM) — set up its own Air­craft Main­te­nance Organ­i­sa­tion to increase the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women in avi­a­tion and aero­space.

Led by Teara Fras­er – the first indige­nous woman in Cana­da to set up and own an air­line – Iskwew Air esti­mates that just 2.8 per cent of air­craft main­te­nance engi­neers are women and less than 0.5 per cent are women of colour.

The launch date of its AMO – March 11th – was cho­sen to reflect the 50th anniver­sary of Mau­reen Rout­ledge, who became the first woman in Cana­da to be licensed as an air­craft main­te­nance engi­neer. Iskwew Air’s AMO is cur­rent­ly led by Alisha Soh­paul, who is a licensed M1 & M2 Air­craft Main­te­nance Engi­neer.

Com­ment­ing on the sur­vey, Sharon Ross­mark, Women and Drones CEO, added: “Peo­ple are busy and we appre­ci­ate that. Still, we hope that all UAS/AAM stake­hold­ers, at every lev­el will share their per­spec­tives and pro­vide input. Your input is crit­i­cal to the selec­tion and devel­op­ment of mean­ing­ful pro­grams and ini­tia­tives, and ulti­mate­ly, to sus­tain and grow the indus­try.”

Each group of 50 indi­vid­ual respons­es will be entered into a draw for a free $50 Ama­zon gift card. To take the sur­vey, click here.