Dragos Budeanu

Senior Manager, Engineering and Maintenance, International Air Transport Association (IATA)

Dragos Budeanu is a Senior Manager, Engineering & Maintenance in the Operations, Safety and Security division of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and is based in Montreal, Canada.

His mandate in the Flight & Technical Operations Department prioritizes collaboration with aviation stakeholders towards implementation of aircraft digital records and aircraft health monitoring processes, standards, procedures and technologies in the airline engineering and maintenance field.

Dragos is the Secretary of IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) Maintenance Task Force, co-rapporteur of the ICAO Airworthiness Panel (AIRP) and advisor to the ICAO Personnel Training and Licensing Panel (PTLP).

Prior to joining IATA in 2014, Dragos was in charge with the Maintenance Training element of the Operational Suitability Data (OSD) in the Certification Directorate of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

With over thirty years of international professional experience in the aviation industry, Dragos has fulfilled several individual contributor and team delivery roles with aviation OEMs (such as Bombardier Aerospace) and airlines (such as TAROM) in both technical capacity and engineering managerial positions.

Dragos holds a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and an Aviation MBA as well as an EASA Part-66 Aircraft Maintenance License with multiple aircraft type ratings.

A many-times speaker at IATA yearly organized events (such as Digital Aircraft Operations Conference or Maintenance Cost Conference), Dragos also delivered presentations or was a panellist at the ATA e-Business Forum (US, 2015), the Aerospace Big Data Series Conference (UK, 2018), the International Conference for Condition Based Maintenance in Aerospace (Netherlands, 2022).

Representing EASA at the time, Dragos was a speaker at the WATS 2011 Maintenance Technician Training stream.

Aviation Maintenance Training Crossroads

While the status of aviation maintenance training as being the means to the end to maintain your aircraft airworthy condition and adequately support the safe operation of your fleet did not change, the plethora of questions to answer and avenues to pursue which maintenance training is faced with are at juncture heights never reached before.

Whereas aviation stakeholders are enthusiastically welcoming the advent of new aircraft technologies (such as Additive Manufacturing or Digital and Connected aircraft) that are changing the boundaries of traditional tech ops, or new additions to the aviation ecosystem (such as Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems or Advanced Air Mobility), one overarching question persists: who will and how do you ready them to maintain the continuing airworthiness of the aircraft global fleet.

This presentation summarizes the challenges and developments which the training industry and its governing regulations must tackle and provides visibility from several vantage points over the efforts to develop potential solutions capable to shape the future of aviation maintenance training.

It is an IATA perspective tuned by direct participation and involvement in the ICAO Personnel Training and Licensing Panel (PTLP) to continue the pursuit in establishing new basis for training and licensing of aviation maintenance personnel.

This presentation highlights the focus on enabling maintenance training to adopt the Competency Based Training and Assessment (CBTA) option as well as to benefit from credited potential of domain specific Simulation Training Devices (STDs); both are main directions in which the aviation industry views must be heard and its exploits in training and employing aviation maintenance professionals must be considered.