Research Facilities

Strategic and Key Aeronautic Research Infrastructures in Europe

AirTN NextGen Facts and Figures

Unique outstanding facilities for Research and Technology Development in the aviation sector have been developed in Europe. Relevant European Stakeholders grow leading edge capabilities to operate effectively and efficiently such facilities.

AirTN Nextgen created a catalogue for the Strategic and Key research facilities for aviation supporting the European Research Area. The catalogue is a unique inventory and is based on the information, provided by stakeholders on a voluntary basis, collected via a questionnaire widely disseminated in the European aviation community; thus some research facilities are not included due to the missed answers to the questionnaire.

This catalogue provides an overview of the European facilities and provides a basis for coordinating further development to achieve the goals set in FlightPath2050.

The AirTN Nextgen classification refers to the financial criteria defined in ACARE for strategic and key facilities:

• Strategic facilities: at least 100 M€ investments. 13 strategic research infrastructures are identified in the catalogue.
• Key facilities: between 10 M€ and 100 M€ investments. Because of the large range of investments, the facilities are distributed in the following cost intervals: between 10 M€ and 30 M€, between 30 M€ and 60 M€, and between 60 M€ and 100 M€. 73 key research infrastructures are identified in the catalogue.
• Common facilities: less than 10 M€ investments. This type of facilities is not included in the catalogue.

Locations of Strategic or Key Aeronautic Research Infrastructures of the catalogue by country.

The research infrastructures in the catalogue can be classified as follow: Wind Tunnel, Propulsion Bench, Others, Structures, Flight test bed, Materials, Simulator, and Supercomputers.

The 86 Strategic and Key facilities listed in the catalogue represent an amount of investments higher than 3 B€.

Repartition of the 86 Strategic and Key facilities by types.

Repartition of Strategic and Key facilities by countries number.

Repartition of Strategic and Key facilities by countries minimal value of the total investments.

Further information on the catalogue

The Brochure Strategic and Key Aeronautic Research Infrastructures in Europe is downloadable.

The detailed descriptions of 78 Strategic and Key facilities are available.

A concise overview of tabular characteristics of 78 strategic and key facilities is shown in the following table, which is also downloadable as (searchable) Excel file.

Previous workshops and reports

Independent Expert Group (IEG)

In September 2012 the European Commission and ACARE tasked an Independent Expert Group (IEG) to identify, with the help of ERA-Net AirTN, how the EU can play a major role in establishing a European Strategic Aviation RDT&E infrastructure and in securing its sustained availability. Findings were presented in the report “Towards a European Strategic Aviation Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation Infrastructure“.

Workshop on Aviation Research Infrastructure

The AirTN-ACARE-EU workshop on “Aeronautics Research & Testing Infrastructures – Key for Europe’s Competitiveness in Aviation” was held on 25-26 February 2013 in Brussels, Belgium.

AirTN-NextGen Events

The “AirTN-NextGen Seminar: Towards virtual certification: Key challenges in the field of simulation capabilities for European Research Infrastructures.” was held on 25 September 2014 in Bonn, Germany.

The “AirTN-NextGen Workshop on Virtual testing, towards virtual certification” was held on 25 May 2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.