The AircraftFire project is funded by the European Commission and it involves some of the most well-known names in fire research, as well as some of the biggest laboratories in material testing. Apart from these researchers, people from the aviation industry (Airbus) and from the regulatory authorities were present at this workshop. I was there as a neutral viewer, keen on finding out the state of the art in European aircraft fire research. As a young tech-savvy person, I live-tweeted from the event (https://twitter.com/IzabellaVermesi) and had lots of fun doing it, so I will do it again at the next conference.
The talks were mostly interesting and showed that a lot of quality research is going into the material characteristics of the composite materials that are used for building planes. However, I felt that many of the presentations lacked context, which is extremely important when presenting one's findings to an audience that consists of people who have no prior knowledge of the topic, especially the authorities and the industry. Disregarding public speaking skills or language problems, many of the presentations simply had too much information to digest in 25 minutes and/or did not have a clear message to take home. The aim of this project (and of the European Union in general) is to make a unified Europe a leading power in the world, in this case the world of aviation fire safety research.It is hard to make a good case for your research to the people who give you money or who make the rules if they don't understand how your research can be applied to bring benefits.
There is a lot of politics involved in this topic, with many stakeholders unwilling to give anything from their part. Whenever the discussion got heated, someone would say "That is politics, we are talking science here" and quickly change the topic. But why? Isn't politics an integral part of this topic? Of course we are here to discuss science, but the science is regulated by politics. It is important to discuss how materials are chosen, why research in a particular area is done, as well who makes the decisions and who benefits from those decisions. Some (possibly a lot) of the research presented will never be used because someone at a company/regulatory authority will decide it is useless, which means that somebody wasted a few months of their life doing things that were ultimately thrown away. And maybe it would have been crucial research, but it was just poorly presented.
Or maybe I just really wanted to see heated discussions about real problems rather than polite exchanges about some particular coefficients.
Returning to the topic of fire safety in aircrafts, I was happy to see interesting developments in the area of evacuation modelling, as well as a lot of work being done in the field of fire retardants. The researchers are very interested in the problem of smoke toxicity, but the people of the industry did not seem to consider that issue as a priority. I was glad to see some quality research being done regarding hidden fires, as those are a hugely underrated issue. It is such a big problem I was expecting this workshop to be overflowing with information about them. It wasn't exactly overflowing, but people seemed to acknowledge the need to focus on this issue.
The workshop ended with some nice words from the European Commission delegate responsible with this project and with the promise of interesting results at the final workshop in Toulouse in September 9th and 10th. I hope the result-presenting session will bring significant contributions to the improvement of aircraft fire safety and will determine the EC to keep funding fire research.
Izabella out.
