Free-to-attend Forum with an incredible speaker line-up

Mr. Wieland has over 39 years of experience with aircraft structural design, analysis and testing.

He began his career as an officer in the United States Air Force designing repairs, performing finite element analysis and damage tolerance analysis.

After joining Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) he expanded his expertise into aircraft usage monitoring, component and full scale testing.  He has been involved with the digital transformation of aerospace structures from the days of 2-D paper drawing and creating finite element models by typing each input card my hand up until todays modern CAD systems with very sophisticated pre and post processors built in.

As a business manager at NLR, Frank Wokke works on aerospace innovation and new project development with a focus on aviation sustainability. He has been involved in a variety of national and European-funded programs aimed at the introduction of hydrogen fuel cell electric propulsion, hydrogen combustion and hybrid electric propulsion in aviation.

Prior to joining Universal Hydrogen, Mark spent the last 20 years at Airbus, where he was the Senior Vice President for Flight Demonstrators and before that the Technical Director of the Beluga XL program.

Under Mark’s technical leadership, the Beluga XL, a major conversion of the A330, was completed on schedule and on budget with entry into service in under two years. He also led the team responsible for bringing the A380 program to entry into service and spent a decade doing flight and ground testing of the A340-600, A350, and A380.

Most recently, he was the CEO of Acubed, the Airbus Silicon Valley innovation center. Mark is an aeronautics graduate of Southampton University before joining British Aerospace Regional Aircraft in the Future Projects department as his first job.

After completing a Masters degree in Aerospace Engineering and a PhD in systems integration, I worked for three years in the development and integration of hybrid powertrains for heavy road vehicles, before joining Short Brothers (now Spirit Aerosystems) in 2014.

Since then I have worked on nacelle and air vehicle systems integration, including fire safety and fire testing. I am now leading the setup of two new R&D programmes, spearheading the application of advanced digital testing methodologies including digital twins and Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).

Dale Goulding is a highly experienced aerospace engineer and has worked on multiple clean-sheet aircraft development programmes, as well as experimental technology demonstrators throughout his 30-year career.

Dale worked at Airbus on the A340-600, A380 and A350-XWB wing leading edge mechanical systems and as a structures and systems integrator on the Bombardier C Series where he ended up leading the engineering teams in flight test. While at AeroTEC he recently led the completion of a demonstration program of hydrogen powertrains.

He is now actively engaged on the STC efforts of an all-electric Cessna Caravan, among other programs.

Dale holds a bachelor’s degree in product design and manufacture from Brunel University in the UK and has built and led multiple international inter-disciplinary teams.

He loves to travel, surf, and pretend he’s younger than he actually is.

Martin holds a degree in Electrical Engineering. Prior to joining Kistler Instrumente AG in 2012, he held various positions in the lighting industry.

After serving as a Product Manager for laboratory signal conditioners for several years, he took on the role of overseeing Test & Measurement's Data Acquisition and Electronics Product Management Team. Today, he works in Business Development, concentrating on Kistler's aviation applications.

Baptiste holds a Master's degree in robotics from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In 2021, he served as the Head of Battery Energy Storage System Development for EPFL's Racing Team, and in 2022, he worked as an Electronics Engineer for the Swiss Solar Boat Project.

Since 2023, he has been a Product Development Engineer at H55, focusing on the company's battery modules for electric aircraft propulsion systems.

Raffaele Donelli is the author of several papers and is a referee for the Italian Ministry of University and Research as well as for the European Commission (Clean Sky 1 &2, Clean Hydrogen programs). He has been the CIRA representative responsible for “Instability and Transition and Flow Control” research group in the “Applied Aerodynamics Laboratory”. He has developed a 3D compressible theoretical model to predict the transition of boundary layers from laminar to turbulent by using linear stability theory, ray theory and multiple scale technique.

Raffaele has significant experience in EU and national projects on topics like laminar flow control technology, active flow control, aerodynamic performances both as a technical researcher and as a work package manager. He has worked on the development of fast CFD methods for transonic flow simulations based on Reduced Order Models.

He has been seconded for several years in the Clean Sky 1 and 2 Joint Undertakings as Dissemination, Exploitation, Risk and Liaison Manager. Since 2020 he has been the head of the unit Programming Strategy and Business Development.

Currently, he has the role of Digital Twin Manager in charge to develop and create the digital twins from existing CIRA Research Infrastructures.

Stefan Kruse studied mechanical engineering at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, where he graduated with a degree in engineering. He then worked as product manager for a company in the technical toy business. Since 2017, he has been working as product manager at HBK where he was responsible for various sensor types such as pressure sensors, multi-component sensors, and the T210 Shaft Torque Sensor.

Stefan has been working in HBK’s Physical Testing unit since 2023, where he is now involved in product management for DAQ systems and high-channel applications and solutions.

With a varied career in experimental materials science, Peter Bailey is now Instron’s principal expert on fatigue and fracture testing of all types of materials, as well as the durability and dynamic aspects of product and device testing.

Within Instron he provides expert interpretation and advice on market and customer needs for software development and complex sales projects, and helps communicate product capabilities. He is an active member of several ISO and ASTM standards committees, in addition to writing and presenting technical papers and articles on novel approaches to mechanical testing and analysis.

My expertise lies in structural testing utilizing Digital Image Correlation (DIC), ranging from quasi-static to high-speed tests. Currently, I am working in the Smarter Testing Project along with Airbus and other project members, where the main focus is on large scale DIC tests.

Dr Matthieu Pettes-Duler holds a PhD in Hybrid-Electric Aircraft Propulsion, with a distinguished career at the forefront of aerospace innovation. He played a pivotal role in the HASTECS project, a collaborative effort with Airbus, spearheading a team of six PhD students, two post-doctoral researchers, and four research laboratories. Together, they explored the future of aviation, culminating in groundbreaking research on fuel cell-powered aircraft.

His expertise continued to shape the industry landscape with Blue Spirit Aero, where he led the design of a CS23 aircraft powered by fuel cell technology and pressurized H2.

Dr. Pettes-Duler's contributions extended to Airbus UpNext in June 2021, where he joined the fuel cell demonstrator project as part of the ZEROe Program, leveraging his expertise in aircraft design and propulsion systems. Today, Dr. Pettes-Duler serves as the Head of Powertrain, overseeing critical aspects of flight testing and ground activities as well.

Abhishek Alladi is a Fellow in Software V&V CoE and an Electronics and Communication graduate with about 19 years of experience in software development and verification activities for avionics systems, specializing in the Real Time Embedded domain. With extensive knowledge in verification of system requirements, coding, system integration, system testing and verification & validation of real time embedded systems, his innovative ideas resulted in 4 publications, 7 Trade Secrets and 7 Filed Patents. He leads Generative AI adoption for Software testing leveraging state-of-the-art On-premises Large Language Models. Additionally, he holds a private pilot license from DGCA, India since February 2013, and have flown Cessna 172R in a G1000 glass cockpit.

Eric is the founder of Elfly Group which aims to bring electric aviation to the consumer and has been working with electric aviation since 2017.
The company's ambitious project is to build and certify a 9-passenger electric flying boat.
Eric has work in successful startups within IT and as an investor in companies Zaptec, Otovo and Bye Aerospace. Now he is fully focusing on electric aviation.

Steve Summers is a director of offering management at NI focusing on mechanical systems and structural test for aerospace and defense customers. He has worked in roles as an application engineer, sales engineer, account owner, and product manager. He has worked in the test and measurement industry for more than 25 years.

Florent Mathieu founded digital imaging software company EikoSim four years ago as a result of research work at the University of Paris-Saclay’s LMT laboratory.

The startup’s main product EikoTwin is image-processing software that enables information to be more accurately transfered between test and design engineers by creating a digital twin that connects directly with simulation pre/post processing tools.

Nichola joined Boeing following a decade-long career working with early stage and scaling startups, where she championed the role of the SME to 
government, particularly in the security and resilience sector. Nichola brings extensive experience of international business development and 
fundraising for growth, from strategy through to execution; with a wide network across governments and industry. Having also gained experience of 
working inside one of the world's largest corporations, she has become even more passionate about the benefits of collaboration between startups 
and corporates. In her role as Managing Partner for Aerospace Xelerated, Nichola invests in and supports startups using innovative technologies to 
the benefit of the aerospace sector and related industries.

Manoj Sarang has spearheaded numerous high-profile projects, including the delivery of multiple turnkey jet engine test cell facilities for some of the world’s largest OEMs. After nearly a decade of hands-on project execution, Manoj has transitioned to a pivotal role at MDS as the DAS Business Strategy Lead. Here, he champions the development and market integration of MDS’ flagship DAS product, nxDAS.

MDS is a pioneer of the iDDS protocol, a game changing communications protocol rapidly gaining traction across the gas turbine testing industry among OEMs, MRO end users, and instrumentation vendors. In his current role, Manoj works to steer the nxDAS product development to align seamlessly with both business objectives and evolving market demands. MDS is a flagbearer for the iDDS protocol and he, along with the MDS team, are working on expanding its adoption and continuous advancement ensuring greater protocol accessibility and enhanced industry-wide collaboration.