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• Aerospace Group
• Air Tightness Testing and Measurement Association (ATTMA)
• Condition Monitoring Technical Committee (COMADIT)
• Industry Group
• Service Inspection Group (SIG)
• Trade Group
• UK Thermography Association (UKTA)

Aerospace Group
Chairman: Robert Smith

Over the last few months the BINDT Aerospace Group has been considering its remit in the light of other changes to the way the aerospace NDT sector is discussed and controlled. In particular, the UK National Aerospace NDT Board (NANDTB) has become a key body fulfilling a vital role for the implementation of NDT in the UK aerospace industry. The Society of British Aircraft Constructors (SBAC) also has a long-standing NDT Special Interest Group (SIG) considering many aspects of standardisation in aerospace NDT.

It has been decided that the BINDT Aerospace Group will fulfil two main roles.

Firstly, it will become more of a high-level 'strategic' group, looking across the British aerospace industry at how NDT can help as civil aerospace goes through a major period of change – the introduction of composite wide-body aircraft. This will involve, among other things, identifying and tackling barriers to the introduction of new NDT technologies and promoting NDT as a solution rather than a burden.

Secondly, the Aerospace Group will provide a forum for Nominated Level III NDT engineers based in aerospace companies, offering a route to share and solve problems or lobby for improvements to the processes that affect them. Thus, the Aerospace Group will work alongside both the SBAC NDT SIG and the NANDTB, which each have distinctly different but complementary remits.

The new objectives can be summarised as follows:

1. To define NDT requirements to meet future aerospace industry goals.
2. To develop roadmaps for NDT technologies to guide knowledge generators (for example universities, RTOs) towards aerospace industry goals.
3. To change the perception of NDT into being a solution rather than a burden, by promoting the benefits of NDT methods within the design, production and maintenance communities.
4. To promote and enable the introduction of new NDT technologies by identifying and tackling barriers, and through scientific evaluation, validation and education of manufacturing and maintenance supply chains.
5. To act as a conduit to standards (SBAC) and certification (PCN and NANDTB) bodies for 'grass roots' problems raised by practitioners and small NDT companies.

The first attempt to actively address objective 3 above happened on 27 April 2010 when the Aerospace Group held a workshop on ply wrinkling in composites, bringing together people from the structural design and engineering communities to discuss their requirements with members of the Aerospace Group.

Regarding objective 4, a new working document has been started, which identifies the barriers to the introduction of new NDT technologies into the aerospace industry. Capturing these is a first stage towards attempting to remove these barriers.

The 2009 annual Aerospace Visit was held on 15 October when we were invited to ATC Lasham at Lasham Airfield in Hampshire. Attendance was good and included some new starters into aerospace NDT who all found the tour of a substantial maintenance facility both interesting and fascinating.
Another change is that the AGM of the Aerospace Group will now be held in April/May each year; details to be announced.