Funding Competition: Future Flight – Closing the Skills Gaps (UK)

Deadline: 1-Feb-23

UK registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £500,000 to develop upskilling initiatives that tackle the immediate skills gaps of the UK aviation industry.

The aim of this competition is to create and deliver course content and materials that will support skills, talent and training across the future flight sector. The purpose of this is to build awareness of future flight emerging markets and fill key gaps in the UK's workforce talent and training capabilities.

Projects can deliver one or more of these objectives:

• Schools’ engagement
• Apprenticeships and internships
• Upskilling and reskilling of existing workforce
• Technical courses and vocational training
• Undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development (CPD).

Your project must demonstrate:

• Alignment with the future flight roadmap and vision
• Strong industrial links and a well defined industry focus
• An understanding and awareness of the future flight industrial skills that are currently lacking and possible future requirements to enable the workforce
• Your planning and commitment to creating and maintaining your resource for a minimum period of 3 years after the funding period
• How you will provide new opportunities not already available to the UK, a region or group of underrepresented people
• Value for money and evidence a return on investment, in terms of trained, upskilled and reskilled people
• An innovative, ambitious and realistic idea to meet a significant future flight talent requirement.

Your project can:

• Produce content and material for outreach, engagement and learning purposes
• Conduct future flight outreach and engagement exercises to individuals, academia, industry and other groups
• Generate and deliver course material or facilitate the running of courses
• Provide training or incentives for training to specific groups of underrepresented people or in specific training subjects.

Specific Themes

The Future flight team has identified some key capability and skills gaps within the future flight industry through direct conversations and surveys.

• These include:
  • Safety and regulation
  • Air traffic management
  • Autonomy
  • Infrastructure (including vertiports)
  • Hydrogen fuel management
  • Digital and cyber security
  • Flight management
  • Local planning
  • Maintenance repair and overhaul (for new classes of air vehicles)
  • Pilot training
  • This list is not exhaustive and they welcome you identifying and tackling other skills requirements within the industry in your project proposal.

Funding Information

• Your project’s total grant funding request must be no more than £50,000.

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project must:
  • Have a total grant funding request between £5,000 and £50,000
  • Start by 1 July 2023
  • Last between 3 and 6 months
  • Carry out all of its project work in the UK
  • Intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project or work alone your organisation must be a UK registered:
    • Business of any size
    • Academic institution
    • Charity
    • Not for profit
    • Public sector organisation
    • Research and technology organisation (RTO)
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • Business of any size
    • Academic institution
    • Charity
    • Not for profit
    • Public sector organisation
    • Research and technology organisation (RTO).

Ineligible

• They are not funding projects:
  • That are not related to future flight skills
  • With grant funding requests over £50,000
  • Not allowed under De minimis regulation restrictions
  • Not allowed under Minimal Financial Assistance
  • They cannot fund projects that are:
  • Dependent on export performance, for example giving an award to a baker on the condition that they export a certain quantity of bread to another country.
  • Dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example if they give an award to a baker on the condition that they use 50% UK flour in their product.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.

For more information, visit https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/1363/overview/623bc6ff-4f6b-4e38-b077-4adb8fed6636