The Future Rotorcraft: Enabling capability through the application of technology

The performance and utility of the ubiquitous edge wise rotary wing configured aircraft has reached a natural limit. The enormous strides taken by the fixed wing community in the development of increasingly efficient, mission focussed, cost effective, green and quick to market solutions have not been matched by the rotary wing community.  The barrier to matching the fixed wing community is not concepts or vision: it is the infrastructure of technology and manufacturing techniques that have contrived to hold our community back.  Learning lessons from the fixed wing community and adapting them to suit the needs of the rotary wing vehicle is our challenge and the time is now right to take on this challenge and succeed.

The rotary wing vehicle has always provided a niche capability, serving its operators well in situations where no other vehicle could achieve the desired result.  It has provided  search and rescue as well as emergency medical services that have saved countless lives, it has delivered military effect with great impact, it has supported the development and realisation of off shore energy delivery and it has connected city centres for convenient transportation.

Yet, despite these achievements the effectiveness of the rotary wing configuration has stagnated as one or two tried and tested configurations using the edge-wise rotor have dominated this mode of transport.
The V22 Osprey and BA609 have shown that other configurations are viable and offer significant performance benefits, but so far the tilt rotor has not shown that it can achieve a paradigm shift in respect of time to market and cost of ownership.  Recently, others have returned to concepts that may have been tried before but until now were only viable as one off prototypes or design studies that never left the drawing boards.

Enabling technologies related to materials, construction and design tools have matured in the fixed wing community and are beginning to find application to rotary wing solutions.  The inevitable and appropriate pressures of environment safety must also be recognised, accepted and converted from complex problem to cost effective solution.

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Merlin AAR Trial

More details on this Flight Test Group lecture will follow shortly.

About the speaker

Andy Strachan is the Deputy Chief Test Pilot at AugustaWestland.

Refreshments will be served from 17.30hrs and the lecture will commence at 18.00hrs.

Please RSVP to the Conference & Events Department at [email protected]

THE EVOLUTION, DEVELOPMENT & CHALLENGES OF COMMERCIAL AIR AMBULANCE OPERATIONS

Military helicopters have routinely provided casualty evacuation from war zones since the latter part of World War 2 up to the present day but, largely unnoticed outside the helicopter community; Alan Bristow was an early pioneer of civilian helicopters being used in the air ambulance role.

In the late 1940’s albeit in a war zone, Alan Bristow was the first civilian helicopter pilot to accept the challenges and overcome the difficulties of providing a casualty evacuation / air ambulance service with the small and underpowered Hiller 360. Alan’s sometimes hair raising flying exploits saw him awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work with the French military during the French Indo-China war.

Modern commercial air ambulance services have come a long way since those early days of single pilot operations using rudimentary helicopters with limited operating capabilities and cabin space. Starting in the late 80’s, Bond Air Services pioneered civil helicopter air ambulance operations in the UK using the Bolkow Bo105 and were fully committed to providing a comprehensive helicopter support network in this role. Such vision and commitment is why today, Bond is the biggest provider of helicopters for UK commercial air ambulance operations.

The helicopters used by Bond Air Services today are modern powerful airframes with a full suite of sophisticated flying aids that are fully equipped for the air ambulance role and routinely performing many ‘mercy missions’ on mainland UK every day. The flights are flown by the company’s highly trained professional flight crews who are able to place the doctors and paramedics alongside a casualty regardless of how remote or difficult it may be.

Captain Paul Westaway, Director of Commercial Services, Bond Air Services Ltd will set the scene and share the challenges and difficulties of providing a modern air ambulance service that works effectively on a regional basis with a large number of charitable and NHS hospital trusts.

About the speaker

Paul Westaway Joined the Cornwall Ambulance Service in 1980 as Control Room Assistant, and later moved on to frontline operational duties as a Qualified Ambulance-man by 1982. In 1983, he was promoted as a sub-officer in the ambulance service HQ, gaining an instructor’s qualification for both Ambulance Aid and Paramedic training by 1985.
He was then selected as Senior Air Crewman to fly on the UK’s first Air Ambulance in April 1987, and seconded to train and fly on first operational missions for Scotland in 1989 (Dundee), West Midlands in 1991 (Halfpenny Green) and Devon in 1992 (Exeter). Appointed as Director of Air Ambulance Development for Westcountry Ambulance Service 1992-1995 and later appointed as Staff Officer and Emergency Planning Officer for Devon, Cornwall and Somerset 1996-2001.
In 2001, Paul joined Bond as Emergency Services Manager, providing the company link between the customers (11 aircraft) and the company’s commercial operations and engineering department. Key milestones :
-    CRMI qualification – developed to CRMIE in 2010
-    General Secretary of the Confederation of Helicopter Ambulance Services, 2003-2008
-    British representative on CEN regulations working group for air ambulances, 2005-6
He was then appointed as Bond Training Services Manager to develop Bond Training Services and pilot training using the world’s first Eurocopter EC135 Level III FTD, 2005-2009. During this period FTD use developed from 450 hours per annum to 1950 hours per annum with worldwide customer base.
Currently Paul is the Director of Commercial since September 2009, overseeing the complete customer base including 18 air ambulance operations throughout the UK, along with marine, offshore wind, lighthouse, police and ad hoc markets.

The lecture will follow with a reception, kindly sponsored by -

Refreshments will be served from 17.30hrs and the lecture will commence at 18.00hrs.

Please RSVP to the Conference & Events Department at [email protected]

From Pioneers to Presidents: Celebrating a Century of Women in Flight

Following the success of last year’s RAeS Women in Aerospace & Aviation Conference, the 2011 Networking Event will celebrate a century of women’s acheivements in flight.

The Wonderful Women Ferry Pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary

The Royal Aeronautical Society is offering a unique opportunity to meet the few surviving women pilots who ferried every type of military aircraft during World War II, including fighters, huge four-engine bombers as the sole pilot and even the first British jet-engine aeroplane. By the end of the war, ATA pilots had each flown dozens of different aircraft, sometimes several in one day, often never having seen the aeroplane before, far less flown it.

During the seminar, you will hear why the ATA was such a unique organisation, how the women ferry pilots were trained and what they achieved, what an RAF bomber pilot thought of the young women who delivered aircraft to his base, and finally hear from the so-called ‘Spitfire Women’ themselves about their memories of these extraordinary times and their experiences.

At the end of this special seminar, the Royal Aeronautical Society will be making a presentation to the ATA women pilots present to honour their extraordinary achievements.

For more than half a century now, the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) has provided for the world’s aerospace engineers, scientists, technologists and managers, the preeminent forum to present and discuss the latest developments in aeronautics. This remarkable apolitical organization founded by Theodore von Karman and his international colleagues, continues to build on its impressive heritage, to be even more relevant to the global aerospace and aviation industries. This world congress staged biennially by ICAS is the key opportunity for those committed to serving those industries to meet, present, discuss and create opportunities that can only be done in such an international environment.

Autumn 2011 Flight Simulation Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS - The Contribution of Flight Simulation to Aviation Safety

Flight Simulation’s broad role in developing, maintaining and enhancing flight safety is well recognised, but have advances in simulation technology and capability been matched by corresponding improvements in the way we conduct training?

Today’s environment is one of increased cockpit automation, airspace congestion, ultra long haul operations, enhanced flight envelope protection and arguably reduced levels of actual manual flying experience in the new generation of flight crews. The levelling off of hitherto falling accident rates, and the changing balance of the causal factors behind them, illustrated by a number of recent highly publicised accidents and incidents, suggest that there are areas for improvement, and that we must continue to strive to further improve our safety record.

The Royal Aeronautical Society Flight Simulation Group has recognised this, and for the past 5 years has overseen several international, multi-disciplinary study groups. The latest one of these is the International Committee for Aviation Training in Extended Envelopes (ICATEE). Its objective is to look at all aspects of live and synthetic training for anticipating, recognising, avoiding, and recovering from unusual attitudes and flight situations, aircraft upset, and loss of control in flight. ICATEE will bring together the best practice in current education, flight instruction and training, updated by the latest research and a rigorous methodology.

Additionally, the IATA International Training and Qualification Initiative (ITQI) promises improvements in flight crew knowledge, skills and attitudes and hence safety through evidence-based competency training regimes. These have far reaching implications on the way flight crew training is conducted, from ab-initio through to type rating and recurrent training, including instructional methods and standards.

While both ICATEE and ITQI are framed around civil large aircraft training and safety requirements, they have the potential to influence military training regimes, which increasingly rely on simulation to maintain standards and mission readiness. At the other end of the spectrum, low cost FSTDs, and new digital interactive media integrated into educational and training simulations, are increasingly being used to address the comparatively poor safety record of General Aviation (GA), both fixed- and rotary-wing. In other aspects of simulator-based training, advances in technology and functionality offer other benefits which can be harnessed to address more specific safety issues.

The conference will principally examine how all these initiatives link together through the use of flight simulation. A significant part of the Conference will be dedicated to the detailed reporting of both the Technical and Training sub-groups of the ICATEE. The sessions will address the approach taken to analyse the training requirements and to develop the rationale for a suitable range of live and simulator-based education, training, and instructional courseware. The Technical subgroup will present its recommendations for data collection and validation in support of enhanced simulator modelling and cueing systems. Papers are also being invited from the IATA ITQI team.

This Royal Aeronautical Society Flight Simulation Conference also invites papers on other safety related issues, in addition to IATA ITQI and ICATEE, such as:

• Simulator technological improvements to meet the safety-driven training and instructional challenges
• Low cost simulation and its potential contribution to safety
• What does GA – fixed wing and helicopters - need from simulation?
• How can flight simulation make a significant reduction in rotary wing accident rates?
• Instructor Qualification and Accreditation
• Human Factors and the Psychological Aspects of Simulator-based training.
• The Live/Synthetic Balance
• Leveraging the next generation in the gaming industry to enhance mission rehearsal training
• New Electronic and Distributed Media, such as games, Social Networks, and the iPad, and their implications for Training and Safety

Full details on how to submit an abstract for the Autumn 2011 Flight Simulation Conference can be found here.

The dealine for received abstracts is Thursday 21st Apri 2011.

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Kindly supported by:

An International Approach to Flight Crew Training Standards

The Annual RAeS International Flight Crew Training Conference is well established and highly successful.  The 2011 Conference aims to seek solutions on how best to consider flight crew training standards from an international perspective.

AEROSPACE FOR EUROPE – MORE THAN JUST FLYING

High Value, Low Carbon, Europes Future

The most important multistakeholder high level roundtable congress in Brussels in December 2010.
This is the aerospace event of the year where decision maker of the most leading European industry, politics and research meet.

Change!  Innovation!  Vision 2050!

Spring 2011 Flight Simulation Conference

The World Outside The Aircraft - Simulating The Operational Environment

Much progress has been made and discussed in previous RAeS Flight Simulation Group Conferences on the simulation of an aircraft and its operational systems for use in flight crew training. International standards have even been drafted in the civil arena defining required levels of simulation fidelity as a function of training tasks.