Planes aplenty at Farnborough!

Wow, what a hectic day! Friday was International Youth Day at Farnborough Airshow. We brought our Aibus A380 flight simulator as part of the launch of the Future Flight 2006 competition. You can read the 'official' press release here... http://www.soton.ac.uk/ses/news/2006/jul/20Jul2006.shtml It was GREAT to have the Future Flight 2005 winners (including Steffan and Gavin above) come to see the Airbus A380 flying its display. Rather nice for us was the fact that the A380 pilot, Peter Chandler, and Red Arrows pilot Martin Higgins were part of the display. Both of these great guys were Southampton Aeronautics & Astronautics graduates. Martin was actually one of my classmates (back in the 1990s!) and always was a real flyboy ;) For more about how they got from University to being the headline flying display at Farnborough 2006 see http://www.soton.ac.uk/ses/news/2006/jul/26Jul2006.shtml So check out www.futureflight.org to win even better prizes for 2006 by designing a futuristic airliner online!!!

Welcome to Engineering at Southampton!

Well, this week is going to be mega. We have almost 200 young people coming to stay with us to see what engineering is like at Southampton. I'm involved in our Headstart Design Triathlon - which won the Royal Academy of Engineering Education Innovation Award earlier in the year! Over 40 17 year olds will be designing planes, speedboats and electric race cars - so loads of fun to be had by all. I'm also leading a new course for the Smallpeice Trust on 'Computers in Engineering'. Participants will be building a supercomputer, and then using it to design an airliner which they'll then fly in our big flight simulator. Quite a lot to do in 4 days, so it should be great :) This one is sponsored by Microsoft, as part of our Institute for High Performance Computing. We even have an Xbox 360 Project Gotham 3 Tournament night on Tuesday which we're all looking forward too . We're also running a Smallpeice Trust courses in Marine Engineering and Bioengineering - just some examples of the exciting things you can do at Southampton! So it's going to be a mad week. Stay posted for photos and more :) For details of all of our schools outreach activities see... http://www.soton.ac.uk/ses/outreach/index.shtml