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Aircraft Engineers International (AEI) Annual Congress 2014
Mar 03, 2015

Aircraft Engineers International (AEI)  Annual Congress 2014

I was honored to attend the 42dnd annual AEI congress in Le Bourget France. I was accompanied by our own AMFA National Director Louie Key. The Congress was graciously hosted by our friends at SNMSAC, our French affiliate and attended by 14 countries and 16 organizations. Here is a breakdown and synopsis of this years Congress.

Mr. Ahamed Mohamed AEI Secretary of Europe/Africa (SNMSAC France) opened the meeting by welcoming all of the attendees to France. He then introduced Jean-Luc Jean George, SNMSAC President who gave a brief opening speech. He stated that it is his goal to better the relationship between his organization and DGAC (the French equivalent of the FAA). He then gave a brief history of Le Bourget, stating that it was the first airport in Paris and was built during the 1st World war. He went on to recognized the contributions that AEI has made to air safety having 38 worldwide members in 34 countries, and a lifelong obligation to uphold the Aviation Safety for passengers and crew.

Mr. Robert Alway AEI President (ALAE UK) then gave an opening speech. After exchanging pleasantries, he recognized French contributions to Aviation, recognized French aviation pioneer Guillaume de La Landelle, who is credited with coining the term aviation, then discussed the increasing use of safety statistics and how deceiving they can be. These statistics have been used as political lobbying tools to relax regulatory oversight, and to justify the use of safety, risk, and performance based oversight systems which he compared to the world’s financial institutions prior to the global financial crisis. He discussed the need for a robust non-punitive occurrence reporting system to accurately track accidents and incidents. At the end of the day safety in the air is dependent upon qualified Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineers performing a quality job on the ground.

Mr. Gillbert Guicheney of DGAC gave a presentation to the congress. He stated that quality and safety are in the hands of the engineers and mechanics performing the aircraft maintenance, and that DGAC supports better regulation through human factors and SMS. He went on to talk about performance and risk based systems stating that with these systems in place authorities should be able to focus on the identified weak points. He cautioned that these systems need to be well thought out to avoid risk. He ended by thanking AEI for the opportunity to speak at the congress and extended a hand of mutual support.

Mr Yannick Malinge of Airbus gave a presentation on safety from a global perspective. He shared data detailing the development of aviation from its inception, and showing the steady increase in safety, and that now we have 1 major accident per 10 million flights. Interestingly, his data showed that the 3 major causes of accidents over the last 15 years have been loss of control, controlled flight into terrain, runway excursion. He then stated how difficult it is to increase the level of safety beyond what we have achieved. He spoke about a new system which has been incorporated into the A380 called Runway Overrun Prevention System (ROPS). This system computes minimum realistic in-flight landing and on-ground stopping distances in real time. It utilizes data on weather, runway conditions and topography, the aircraft weight, and configuration. He went on to say that the system has already averted 2 potentially disastrous incidents. He ended by stating how important the sharing of information is to increasing the overall level of air safety as we must learn from our experiences.

The Congress began with an introduction of the AEI Executive Board, election of a minutes Secretary, Congress Tellers, the adoption of the minutes for the previous year’s congress, and other general organizational business.

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