2023 SAWE Scholarship Winners

Congratulations to our 2023 SAWE Scholarship Winners! Two scholarships were awarded this year at the 82nd Annual International Conference on Mass Properties in Cocoa Beach Florida on May 24th. Dylan Van Holton received the SAWE Dirk Petersen Scholarship and Delaney Robertson received the SAWE Jim Valentine Memorial Scholarship. For more information, please visit https://www.sawe.org/students/sawe-scholarship-awards/. Congratulations again to our winners, and best wishes on your academic careers!

Mentoring Webpage Goes Live

It’s Alive!  Unlike Dr. Frankenstein’s protégé’s creation in Ingolstadt, this is nothing to fear – “It” is the SAWE Mentoring Webpage [https://www.sawe.org/training/mentoring/].  The Mentoring webpage is the newest part of the SAWE’s membership career development initiative.

First, please note that the Mentee application is not yet live, however, the rest of the page is.

A lot has happened behind the scenes to make it possible to go (mostly) live with the webpage.  The Mentoring Charter has been through extensive review by the Mentoring Committee.  The webpage itself has also been created and tested.  The committee created a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s).  An application form for Mentors is up and running, as we need mentors available before we can match Mentees with Mentors.  Solicitations to specially chosen senior SAWE mass properties engineers have been sent out – they are now able to formally apply as Mentors using the web-based form (and utilize a special template to formulate their input prior to filling out the web-based application form).

Still to come, of course, is a companion application for Mentees.  Along with this will be a “behind the scenes” means of matching Mentees with appropriate Mentors, as well as metrics to track relationships, completion status, and effectiveness of the program as created.

A Mentoring Logo depicting the “Passing the Torch” with the SAWE Wings and program name is prominent on the webpage as well as a link to current committee membership and a contact form.  Along with the contact form, a special email address (mentoring@sawe.org) is also live.

Watch for further developments to come, with emphasis on this latest career development program becoming fully active by Cocoa Beach.

National Hydrogen Day

Coming to the Oct 28th forum for SAWE in the Hydrogen Economy? Don’t forget H2, atomic No. 1.008 aka 10/08 – is National Hydrogen Day! https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/celebrate-national-hydrogen-and-fuel-cell-day-department-energy and if you’re looking for a great primer on the looming hydrogen economy check out this hour long video from Caterpillar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pI6JNUf5ek

2021 80th International Conference – UPDATE

I regret to inform our membership that due to the pandemic your SAWE Board of Directors has decided to cancel this year’s in-person conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida. With the rise in COVID cases and the increasing travel restrictions for our attendees, our financial outlook for the conference made it unwise to proceed. While we were all looking forward to seeing each other again face to face, the current circumstances required us to make this difficult decision.

I would like to thank the Florida Space Coast Chapter for all the hard work they put into hosting this conference for us. As many of you know, this is no small task, and they had everything prepared and ready to go. I also appreciate the work of our Executive Committee who supported all aspects of the preparation. I personally have learned a lot from this experience, and we will hopefully be able to apply these lessons to the next in-person conference in Savannah, GA in May, 2022.

While I am disappointed that we will not be meeting in beautiful Cocoa Beach this year, our team is quickly assessing our options for holding another virtual conference. More details to come.

Thanks for your support of SAWE, and I look forward to meeting with you all in the near future, either virtually or in-person in Savannah.

Sincerely,

Damian Yañez
International President
Society of Allied Weight Engineers, Inc.
damian.yanez@sawe.org

Boeing Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT2)

The second Boeing Orbital Flight Test of The Commercial Starliner Capsule is scheduled to launch and dock with the International Space Station (ISS) in the near future. The Society of Allied Weight Engineers (SAWE) long time Corporate Partner Space Electronics (now Raptor Scientific) helped to make it possible, https://raptor-scientific.com/products/weight-and-cg-of-large-objects-and-spacecraft/. The Starliner Crew Module (CM) during a Weight and Center of Gravity test is shown at https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasakennedy/50884857527/in/photostream/lightbox/. All events are historic. Grab a piece of Space history first-hand, https://www.nasa.gov/feature/what-you-need-to-know-about-nasa-s-boeing-orbital-flight-test-2. To the International Space Station and Beyond, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html!

Standards and Practices: Military Aircraft Industry Subcommittee Meeting: May 18, 2021

All are welcome to join the Standards and Practices Committee Military Aircraft Industry Subcommittee for a Zoom meeting on May 18th from 10:00 – 12:00 PM US Eastern Daylight Time. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss:

  • Preparations for the SAWE International Conference in October
  • Solicit presentations and volunteers to develop presentations for the Military Aircraft session at the International Conference
  • Short Topic – Recent Experience in Out-of-Tolerance Weighing Results of US Navy Aircraft

Registration in advance is required for this meeting:

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please note that to join the meeting, you MUST use the Zoom desktop client or mobile app. You will not be able to join using the web client.

Public Draft – SAWE TO-2 “Procedure for Developing and Maintaining Documents”

A proposal to revise SAWE Recommended Practice TO-2 “Procedure for Developing and Maintaining Documents” is now available for comment at the Standards and Practices Public Review site here: https://www.sawe.org/standards/public-review/

The draft review period ends on 18 April 2021.

Missiles and Space Committee Meeting Review

The Missiles and Space committee of Standards and Practices held its first meeting outside of the international conference of any recent memory. This meeting was open to all SAWE members with an interest in Missile and Space committee activities and despite the rather short notice, we were happy to end up with a very well attended session, including European attendees. There was primarily discussion of the Recommended Practices (RPs) that Missiles and Space controls: RP A-6, Coordinate Systems; RP 9 and RP 10 Weight and Balance Control and Forms for Guided Missiles; and RP-16, Mass Properties Measurement. But the main takeaway was that if you have questions, comments, inputs about any Recommended Practices or anything Standards & Practices is responsible for, an email to standards@sawe.org will get your concern forwarded to the right person.

More informative meeting minutes and charts can be found at GroupOffice in the folder projects2/Standards and Practices/IC – Missiles & Space/Other Meetings. The next quarterly Missiles and Space meeting is planned for Friday, May 21st.

Thanks again to all that attended