Research*EU Magazine | Number 29 (February 2014)

Shaping the future of air transport

Summary:

Overly complex, disparate and inefficient communications could delay a pilot’s reactions to unforeseen events, suggests our feature story, ‘Networking the sky with new aircraft communication technology’. But EU-backed researchers in the SANDRA project have successfully tested new in-flight communications to help aircraft travel safely and efficiently. The success of the technology prompted the European Commission to include this flagship project in its communications heralding the launch of the new Horizon 2020 research programme.

This issue of Research*EU results magazine details the technologies used by SANDRA and other research developments ‘shaping the future of air transport’, including revolutionary wing designs for smoother flight, noise dampening in helicopters, and more. If you prefer more down-to-earth topics, our ‘biomed’ section gets to the roots of better crops and offers insights into our unique tree of life. The feature story in our ‘social sciences and humanities’ section asks the question: What makes a good concert hall work? Researchers are modelling the acoustics in music halls for better building design and augmented reality applications.

Apart from air transport stories, the ‘energy and transport’ section features ‘System support for moving goods at port terminals’. The ‘environment’ section kicks off with a story about efforts to monitor Europe’s marine environment more effectively, and the ‘industrial technologies’ section showcases how the machine tool sector is responding to industrial changes. Finally, the ‘space’ section focuses on how satellite technology can improve port safety, and the usual preview of events and conferences concludes issue 29.

Contents:

Health

Industrial Technologies

Digital Economy

<Climate Change and Environment

Energy

• Primary Source

• Alternative Source