Meet Eoghan, Aviation Sustainability Consultant at NACO

An interesting background of working in aviation

“From the start, I was already engaged with aviation. Before starting my job at Royal HaskoningDHV, I was working for a ground handling service provider at Dublin Airport during my studies. Here, I learned a lot about the operational side of aviation such as check-in, boarding process, and the turnaround process of aircraft. Coming from an aircraft maintenance and engineering education background, safety culture was extremely important to me. At Royal HaskoningDHV, I see that there is also a healthy, safe and supportive environment which I really like.”

A look into the diverse and international projects

“Currently, I am working on an airport in Latin America where we are diving into sustainability topics on how to improve the sustainability. One element of this is, for example, solar panels. There are multiple important factors for their implementation at an airport; where can we best put these solar panels? What type of solar panels are the most suitable? Another great project is the master plan of an airport in Southeast Asia where I was working on electric ground handling equipment, and the modelling of the power demands.

Besides that, I also worked on their sustainability strategy focusing into economics, social issues, and environmental issues, as well as developing a climate hazard strategy. Closing off that project, I also engaged with an airport in Europe where I was tasked with embedding sustainability into the master plan, taking into consideration local, national and global sustainability goals and tying them in with the airports ambition. This shows that my work is very diverse and international.”

Each country offers different challenges

“Largely, the national goals and policies are the drivers of the sustainability agenda in a lot of airports in Europe. Therefore, it is interesting and also a challenge to think of sustainability in different ways and on different levels for each country. For example, in some areas of the world I see that waste segregation is not common which gives us the opportunity to provide guidelines for an entirely new waste management system. On the other hand, I see there is a large variance between initiatives depending on the region of the world. This is becoming clear with alternative fuels such as SAF, electric and hydrogen. In some airports there is a big focus on hydrogen and SAF, whereas in others there will be great focus into electric eVTOLs and SAF – it’s super varied which makes it very fun to work on!”

The experienced work culture at Royal HaskoningDHV

“I experience that my personal development is really looked after at. Recently, I joined the project management day at the office in Amersfoort which was really informative. Also, I can follow managerial development trainings and soft skills development trainings. Besides that, the culture here is supportive and open. I also really like the Dutch culture which has a super direct communication style, compared to the UK and Ireland. I notice the diversity too, considering the sizeable male-female ratio which is expected to be even more diverse over time.

Working with different cultures in my projects is also very nice. In addition, I constantly work with different people from different backgrounds such as architects, structural and electrical engineers, solar panel experts, passenger experience experts, master planners, IT and digitization experts, and runway planners. Within NACO, everyone is very specialized in a way everybody has to connect together which is very interesting because you end up learning from everybody else. Also, I get the opportunity to travel for work to places many places worldwide, which is fantastic! What stuck out to me that I began to really value, is that I can shape the job how I want it to be.”