Hajime Yoshimura of Japan appointed new president of the ICAO Air Navigation Commission

The Council of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has unanimously appointed Commissioner Hajime Yoshimura to a one-year term as President of the ICAO Air Navigation Commission (ANC), the UN civil aviation Organisation’s main technical body.

Mr. Yoshimura was nominated for the appointment by Japan and his mandate begins on 1 January 2017. He has served as a Commissioner of the ICAO ANC since March 2013 and was appointed First Vice-President of the ANC in 2016.

Prior to this, Mr. Yoshimura had dedicated nearly 20 years of his career to the Civil Aviation Bureau of Japan (JCAB), sharing his expertise in the fields of air navigation, airworthiness and air transport safety operation. In his position as Deputy Director of JCAB’s Airworthiness Division, Mr. Yoshimura oversaw the development of national airworthiness and environmental standards and served a co-project manager of the certification of the first Japanese regional jet. He also provided oversight to Japanese air carriers as Chief Safety Inspector from 2012 to 2013.

In addition to his safety expertise, much of Mr. Yoshimura’s career has been spent planning and developing air navigation systems. From 2005 to 2010, as Special Assistant to the Director of JCAB’s Air Traffic Services Department, he developed national mid- and long-term plans for air traffic services systems in Japan, known as CARATS (Collaborative Actions for Renovation of Air Traffic Systems). CARATS contributed to the development of the ICAO Aviation System Block Upgrade (ASBU), part of the Global Air Navigation Plan (GANP).

As an Air Navigation Commissioner at ICAO, Mr. Yoshimura has been Chairman of the ANC Working Group of the Whole on Air Navigation Work Programmes Deliverables Production (PDP) from October 2014 to December 2015, and has been a member of the ANC Planning Team since October 2014. Prior to this, he had actively contributed to the achievement of the first-ever Aircraft CO2 Emissions Standard Metric System through his membership of ICAO’s Committee on Aviation Environment Protection (CAEP) and, thorough his membership of the ICAO Navigation Systems Panel, to the development of standards for the Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS).

As part of his new duties as the President of the ANC, Mr. Yoshimura will  follow up on the implementation and development of ICAO’s global aviation plans, which were endorsed at the Organisation’s recent 39th Assembly. He will also lead the preparations for the 2018 ICAO 13th Air Navigation Conference, at which convergence on the next generation of Datacom and agreement on the system architecture for Global System-Wide Information Management (SWIM), amongst other critical innovations, are expected.