In October this year there will be another InterAirport Europe exhibition in Munich. Will it be worth visiting by an Air Traffic Management (ATM) professional, or is it not relevant for ATM at all? Let’s have a look into the memories from my first visit to this show in 2023.
The trade fair that I am attending annually is Airspace World, which seems to me the most obvious choice for an ATM professional. I imagined the Inter Airport Europe event as being intended for companies from the landside of the airport business and for infrastructure suppliers.
After my arrival I realized I was not really mistaken – the clear focus of the event was on airport infrastructure of various kinds – airport lighting, surface inspection, water drainage, and firefighting. I saw many passengers and baggage handling systems and products, like antimicrobial trays for security check, passenger scanners and the like.
The size of the event was similar to Airspace World 2023, however the exhibition area was split into two exhibition halls. What was new to me was that the entrance fee – a one day ticket to attend the trade fare was an investment of 42€. Affordable, and probably ensuring that the event is attended by people who are really interested in the topic.
After the registration, I got access to the platform where I could browse through profiles of other registered visitors and exhibitors and arrange meetings with them. It was very useful to have an overview of who is visiting the event and the platform made it easier to schedule meetings with contacts of interest. Moreover, one part of the exhibition hall provided a dedicated meeting space with chairs and tables that could be used for free after booking via the event platform. Before entering the exhibition halls, one could find a corner with industry paper magazines to be collected for free.
Strolling around countless stands, I went for a search of any ATM companies that would provide systems or products related to Air Navigation. In the end I managed to find a few. For example – ANSART, exhibiting their ADS-B based Airport Traffic Monitoring System – the tool for Airport operators and ANSPs which is a sort of a simplified version of the A-SMGCS for apron management and boosting ground traffic situation awareness. The next one – Insero Air Traffic Solutions, at the booth I was shown their ATIS/VOLMET system, AWOS and the airport lighting control panel. I visited the booths of Avinor, Opscom and ACR, where I learned about their Drone Request tool, which is a “pre-UTM” platform for checking the space requirements, current traffic situation and inputting the relevant information about the drone flight. I also met with fellow Polish attendees – Airotec exhibited their two most iconic products: AWOS – the software for automated weather observation systems and DEFI – drone-based visual aids inspection. Another Polish company – AP-TECH, providers of the first A-SMGCS solution in Poland.
My Inter Airport Europe visit was overall a good experience, I had a few good conversations and met several interesting contacts. The arguments in favor of visiting the show by an ATM person is that there are many airport decision makers visiting the show, and therefore it is a good opportunity to make oneself visible and create possibilities to connect. Besides that, there were quite a few ATM-related exhibitors that seemed to be enjoying traffic at their booths.
On the other hand, Inter Airport Europe was strongly focused on products and services related to airport infrastructure and terminal operations, and the visitors were mostly professionals with this kind of interest. Moreover, I didn’t see any ANSP business representatives.
I find networking and connecting with people one of the most important factors in our industry (and many other industries as well), as a conclusion I would say it was definitely worth the visit, especially as it was only a short distance travel for me.
