The six scientific association participating in E-CAero2 have the global aim to spread the scientific exchange and knowledges across the scientific comminuty, but also across institutions, and general public. Scientific communication proceeds through two main channels: (1) social events like conferences and (2) written articles published in dedicated scientific journals and books. Both were concerned in E-CAero, with emphasis de facto placed on the first.
The E-CAero programme has accomplished a great deal in generating a community spirit and developing a friendly and constructive atmosphere between the six players, who hardly knew each other at the start. A significant number of conferences of medium and large scales were run that featured co-organised sessions, a great step towards broadening the visibility and enhancing the value of the meetings. Further, interaction and cross-fertilisation between scientific disciplines and between some industrial activity sectors that before didn’t interact greatly with aeronautics has been fostered. This, incidentally, is unique; it is an important asset for Europe.
These associations conduct all of their activities or part of them within the Aeronautics/ Turbomachinery/Aerospace sectors in Europe. The project aims at coordinating and harmonising the dissemination of knowledge and advances accomplished in these areas.The project answers the MG1.6-2014 topic within the Transport Societal Challenge of H2020 framework programme with the aim of creating ECAA (European Community in Aeronautics and Astronautics).
The objectives of E-Caero 2 can be extended as a continuation path from the former project E-Caero. These objectives, keeping in mind the paradigm of creating ECAA as a tool to implement them and to provide sustainable continuity in the future are listed below:
• Enhance the communication between the associations: reaching an upgraded level of communication among partners as a follow-up task of what has been done in E-Caero,
• Set-up of a logistic platform with advanced IT tools shared by associations and unify the existing logistics among the consortium, which will help to harmonize the actions from each partner and reach other objectives,
• Progress in the synchronization of events as a follow-up of what has been done in E-CAero, avoiding overlapping between organizations and conferences. Merging or clustering events, where appropriate in order to ensure better scientific or technical quality by aggregating expertise and avoiding redundancies,
• Taking initiatives towards joint publication policy in Europe,
• Promoting a co-ordinating federation of associations, but which nevertheless does not affect negatively activities of each association,
• Providing a more visible European label to aeronautical events and publications initialised by the associations,
• Establishing a unified logistics network and an ad hoc secretariat for events of the ECAA in a sustainable way, e.g. by an ECAA administration office,
• Properly quantifying the size of the scientific/industrial community and the desirable number of events,
• Offering a better harmonized information to scientists and technologists for their research and their designed products with a broad range of expertise at a glance by collaborative events,
• Establishing guidelines for a common policy in the Aerospace Research Publication domain with focus on open access.
Almost all the defined objectives above represent the rational follow-up of the objectives defined in E-CAero. Some of them are already fulfilled, although E-CAero 2 must deepen on the tasks to go one/several step(s) beyond.
