30th Society of Flight Test Engineers European Chapter symposium

The 30th European Chapter Symposium “Worldwide Cooperation in Flight Testing” was held in Toulouse, France, from June 10th to 14th, and was also the 50th SFTE International symposium. As a result, the delegates were from a very broad range of backgrounds and cultures which made for some very rich exchanges. Furthermore, the conference venue was being used in parallel for the European Test and Telemetry Conference (ETTC) and delegates from both events were able to attend each other’s’ presentations to further improve knowledge sharing, as well as visit the exhibition area to meet suppliers to the test industry.

The first day was filled with “short courses”, which are a feature of International symposia. Delegates were able to choose between training sessions on Control Room Training, Military Standards for Flying Qualities and Artificial Intelligence Techniques. There was also time for the SFTE HQ board meeting with video conferencing for those members unable to travel from the USA.

On the second morning, a plenary session with the ETTC allowed delegates to hear keynote speeches from Patrick Du Che, Head of Airbus Commercial Aircraft Flight and Integration Test Centre, Sandra Bour Schaeffer, head of Airbus Flight Demonstrators, Céline Calleya of CNES and Eric Landel of Renault. The morning was completed with the SFTE-EC board meeting which included the election of Paul Koks from the NLR as the new European Chapter president.

There then followed 8 sessions of technical papers across three days, allowing a total of 23 subjects on areas such as testing autonomous vehicles, large aircraft test beds and “people power” to be presented and discussed. In addition there was a special presentation from Airbus flight test engineer Stephane Vaux on Airbus fly-by-wire systems. An international senior panel of judges decided that the best paper was “Machine Learning techniques Applied to Flight Test Data Evaluation” written by Kelton Busby and Rebecca Hattery of Aerotech.

A comprehensive social program was available throughout the week; a welcome drinks reception on Monday evening; a welcome reception in the exhibition hall on Tuesday evening, the corporate sponsors dinner on Tuesday evening as well at which Hugues van der Stichel, Airbus test pilot, talked about the A350 flight test campaign; a walking tour of downtown Toulouse and reception at a typical French bar on Wednesday evening; a visit to the Aeroscopia museum on Thursday afternoon and finally the gala dinner with awards presentation on Thursday evening, at which Fernando Alonso, flight test engineer and former head of military aircraft at Airbus, gave an inspiring speech. Fernando also presented the inaugural Jesualdo Martinez Award to Gerard Desbois, test flight engineer at Airbus.

The week was completed on Friday morning with a visit of the Airbus test facilities, during which delegates visited the A320 final assembly line, the development simulators and “iron birds” and the telemetry room, as well as having a chance to get on board the A350-1000 prototype aircraft.

Thanks to the organising committee, the contributions from exhibitors Scalian, FloridaTech, the ITPS and AeroTEC, the generous sponsorship of Airbus, and finally to all presenters and participants for making this event possible!