The ICAS 2022 congress was held at Stockholm Waterfront Congress center and hosted by FTF in collaboration with Innovair.
The congress was a big undertaking for FTF with a financial risk larger than we understood in 2018 when our bid to host ICAS 2022 was presented. ICAS had already decided that the ICAS 2022 congress should be held in Europe and FTF and Sweden won this in competition with bids from two other countries.
When we started the planning for ICAS 2022 in 2018 we could not imagine which hurdles might come our way in the running up to the congress. The Covid pandemic and the associated lockdowns were not known and when the decision was taken to postpone ICAS 2020 in Shanghai with one year we expected that to be negative for ICAS 2022. The postponement of ICAS 2020 to a hybrid congress in 2021 also implied a new and shorter procedure for abstracts. How would this affect ICAS 2022? The experiences of the hybrid congress in 2021 convinced us that this was not the way to go for a worldwide congress like ICAS 2022 and we finally decided for an in-person congress.
An ICAS 2022 Promotion folder was published in April 2021 and the ICAS 2022 Call for Papers was published in July 2021.
Luckily the covid restrictions in Sweden and Europe were relaxed well in time for the ICAS 2022 congress. The Russian invasion in Ukraine in February 2022, and the associated boycotts, was another hurdle with a potential to affect the possibilities to pursue the ICAS 2022 congress. However, our Russian colleagues voluntarily withdrew their papers, and the congress hence had no participants from Russia.
In the end it turned out that people were very eager to meet again in-person and hence ICAS 2022 in Stockholm had over 1000 participants from 35 countries. With over 200 registered student participants (undergraduate and graduate) this created an interesting balance of experienced persons interacting with the future generation of scientists and engineers. Due to the covid lock-down situation in China a special solution with pre-recorded presentations was arranged for Chinese presenters.
The ICAS 2022 Preliminary Programme was published in April 2022. Detailed programme changes were made until two weeks before the congress and the final technical programme was available via a congress digital platform. The congress had some 600 technical papers presented in 14 parallel sessions. These included eight plenary lectures, starting with the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Award lecture by Anders Blom and ending with the von Karman Award lecture presented to the Clean Sky 2 JTI.
To enhance the overall scientific level of the congress a large number of invited keynote lectures and complete invited sessions were organized. The plenary lectures and the technical invited sessions in track 1 were all video recorded and can all be watched on the ICAS Youtube channel. Links are provided here to the opening and closing ceremonies.
The congress proceedings are available on the ICAS website proceedings.
ICAS 2022 Social events included the Congress Reception on Monday in the Stockholm City Hall hosted by the City of Stockholm, a student party on Tuesday and the Congress Banquet on Thursday at the Vasa Museum. For accompanying persons tours were arranged Monday – Thursday. On Friday a Technical tour was arranged to Linköping with visits to Saab and the newly opened Innovative Material Arena (IMA).
Partners and Exhibitors are key elements for a successful ICAS Congress. We published the ICAS 2022 Exhibit and Partnership Prospectus in October 2020 and started to make contacts. A first goal was to secure our domestic industries as partners, and we were lucky to at an early stage get Saab as Platinum and GKN Aerospace as Gold partners. We later recruited a number of additional Gold and Silver partners as well as several exhibitors. This made up for a very interesting congress exhibition. Special thanks to our partners and exhibitors, who helped make the congress possible.
The ICAS 2022 congress was considered the best ever, see letter of appreciation from ICAS. Despite the financial challenges, FTF made a fair surplus from the congress after delivering a substantial levy to ICAS. The FTF congresses, normally national, are arranged every third year and the congress surplus is the basis for FTF’s work to promote and stimulate interest in aviation and space technology in Sweden.
The ICAS 2022 website (with many pictures from various events) is still available on www.icas2022.com. Innovair also published a special newsletter about ICAS 2022.