Aviation refuelling company Gazpromneft-Aero has held the second international Aviation Fuelling Challenge (AFC) in Belgrade.
The event was held in collaboration with the IATA Fuel Quality Pool (IFQP) and The Joint Inspection Group (JIG), which were established for the inspection of aircraft fuel quality and the development of aviation fuel supply standards, respectively.
The challenge, which pits aviation fuel suppliers against one another, saw the following ten teams from across the globe compete to be crowned best performing team in international aviation fuelling: Total (France), CNAF (China), China Aviation Oil (China), Petrolimex Aviation (Vietnam), NIS (Serbia), OMV Petrom (Romania), Makpetrol A.D. (Macedonia), Hifa Oil (Bosnia and Herzegovina), BATO (Russia) and Gazpromneft-Aero (Russia).
“This year, for the first time in the framework of AFC, a workshop was held among the competition participants, which involved each team presenting practical ideas and solutions to ensure safe aircraft refuelling,” said Vladimir Egorov, General Director of Gazpromneft-Aero.
“Our competition is the only world-wide challenge where production specialists from all over the world are invited to exchange best practices and work on the development and standardization of global aviation fuel supply processes.”
The competition was based on the application of international quality standards for aviation fuelling and required participants to submit tests in electronic format and complete two practical tasks.
The team stage included four practical tasks with time limits and there were also three individual nominations for aviation fuel-tanker drivers (Wingman), shift supervisors (Operational manager), and deputy production chiefs (Technical manager.
The best-performing team of the competition was judged to be Gazpromneft-Aero (Russia), followed by NIS (Serbia), while the third place went to CNAF (China).
The individual prizes were awarded to Guangzhong Zhang (China Aviation Oil), Vladimir Gorin (Gazpromneft-Aero) and Ljubinko Marinković (NIS) for ‘Best Fuel Tanker Driver’.
The ‘Best Shift Supervisor’ award went to Alexander Slugachev (Gazpromneft-Aero), Eric Brunel (TOTAL) and Ruslan Mikhailov (BATO).
