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Meet on aerospace medicine from today

By Our Staff Reporter



Air Marshal Padma Bandopadhyay addressing the media in Bangalore on Tuesday. Air Vice Marshal Ranjit Kumar, Principal Medical Officer, Headquarters Training Command, is seen. — Photo: K. Gopinathan

BANGALORE, NOV. 16. About 200 Indian and foreign delegates, including doctors and scientists of international repute, will arrive here on Wednesday to participate in the 45th annual conference of the Indian Society of Aerospace Medicine (ISAM). The three-day conference will be inaugurated by the Vice-Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal, S.K. Malik.

Briefing presspersons here on Tuesday, the Director General Medical Services (Air), Air Marshal Padma Bandopadhyay, said the conference would focus on all aspects of aviation, including aerospace medicine and aeronautics. Scientific deliberations and exhibition of aero-medical equipment would be part of the event.

Among the technical sessions lined up for the conference include the Air Marshal Subroto Mukherjee Memorial Oration on "Ergonomic design of cockpit of an advanced combat aircraft", to be delivered by Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) Director, M.B. Verma. Also on the agenda is a talk on "Managing pilot fatigue in sustained military operations I and II — applied research on alertness enhancing pharmaceutical compounds", by American scientists, John A. Caldwell and J. Lynn Caldwell, from the Fatigue Countermeasures Branch, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.

The lecture is scheduled for Thursday.

Wing Commander S.K. Sharma will speak on "UAV operations: An analysis of incidents and accidents with human factors and crew resource management perspective". This talk will be held on the inaugural day.

Air Marshal Padma Bandopadhyay said ISAM, established in 1957, had over 900 members, including doctors, engineers, aircrew, scientists and psychologists.

The ISAM will host the 54th international congress in September 2006.

Role of ISAM

The ISAM, she said, was involved in selection, evaluation of military and civil aircrew, aero-medical consultancy in aircraft design and life support systems and promotion of flight safety besides aircraft accident investigation and aero-medical research.

"It imparts specialised training to aircrew including High-G and Spatial Disorientation training and hypoxia indoctrination," she said.

Last year, the Air Marshal said, the ISAM commenced its night vision goggles training for helicopter crew of the Indian Air Force, Navy and the Army in the indigenously developed laboratory on its premises.

"This laboratory has been recently upgraded and air conditioned, and will continue to be utilised for indoctrination of our aircrew in the aero-medical aspects of night vision goggles flying," she said.

Modernisation plans

On ISAM's modernisation plans, Air Marshal Padma Bandopadhyay spoke about the state-of-the-art Spatial Disorientation simulator, installed on its premises on May 17 this year, to impart training to the aircrew.

"Other new equipment that is in the process of procurement is the new human centrifuge and the decompression and hyperbaric chambers," she said.

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