Lecture Programme

Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactors by James Bellingall Rolls-Royce. James will be presenting on the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) design and the product's place in the civil nuclear market. The primary benefit of the SMRs is that they would help reduce our reliance on  non-sustainable energy sources, quickly. After the talk, there will be a Q&A session where attendees will be able to ask questions. 6 for 6:30pm. Portland Building, Room P0.41 University of Portsmouth, St James Street, Portsmouth PO1 3AH. Non-members are welcome to attend our events but you will need to create a non-member account to do this; it’s free and will only take a few minutes. To do this, please visit http://www.imeche.org/my-account/Register

The Royal Aeronautical Society Heathrow Branch is pleased to announce and cordially invite you to join us at our upcoming Charles Abell Named Lecture, to be held on Thursday, 06 November 2025, at 18:15 GMT.

In this RAeS Heathrow Branch lecture, we are delighted to welcome Martin Maltby FRAeS, Chief Engineer, Rolls-Royce (Ret'd), to share his insight on ‘Investigating the Unthinkable: Total fuel exhaustion in Mid-Atlantic’. In brief, the speaker will discuss the root cause, the pilots' actions, and the subsequent formal inquiry into Azores Glider. The audience are invited to consider how they would have responded to the evolving situation.

The Branch is delighted to hold this event in a hybrid format, with the in-person session at British Airways HQ Waterside, and the virtual session via Microsoft Teams.

For further event details, please refer to the lecture flyer attached or the event's site here. To register, please visit http://tiny.cc/RAeSLHR, by selecting the in-person or virtual session. If your organisation blocks external URL shortener, please visit aerosociety.com/Heathrow, and browse under ‘Upcoming Events’. Alternatively, you may contact us at Heathrow@aerosociety.com if you encounter any issues during registration.

*** IMPORTANT NOTICE ***

For security and/or administration purposes, advance registration is required for all RAeS Heathrow Branch events. For in-person attendees, please note that British Airways Waterside is a secure venue, and you must present a photographic ID to be checked on arrival.

The Extraordinary Life of Air Commodore Ernest L Howard-Williams MC by Conductor, Author and family member Anthony Inglis Howard-Williams.

This presentation tells the story of Anthony Inglis Howard-William’s grandfather, who besides falling out of his aeroplane at 500ft in 1916 without a parachute, and surviving, details his life from winning the MC for flying over The Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele in WWI, through inter-war engineering courses at 3 universities; spells at the Royal Arsenal where he invented the cylindrical bomb without fins and secondment to the staff college at Andover, whilst all the while trying to persuade the air ministry to adopt his ideas of University Air Squadrons, dive bombers and arguing for the death of the battleship. He was the first person to fly east to west (and back again) across Africa, and during WWII had appointments as number two to Dowding at Bentley Priory in 1939, with subsequent postings at Halton (where Anthony was born) and Blackpool. There are scandals, murders and intrigue in this story, as he battled to try and persuade others of his vision of aviation and war.

Anthony Inglis is one of the busiest and most eclectic of international classical music Grammy-nominated conductors. He has led more than 250 performances at the Royal Albert Hall, conducted royal concerts, is the Music Director of the London Concert Orchestra and for the Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins. He is the author of A Family of Aviators at War: The Somme, Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, Night-Fighter Mosquitoes, Chinooks: The Story of Nine RAF Pilots From One Family.

7pm for 7:30pm.

Westminster Theatre, Farnborough College of Technology, Boundary Road, Farnborough, GU14 6SB. The Westminster Theatre is in the UCF Study Centre building close to the main entrance in Boundary Road.

£3 donation invited from non-members. RAeS members, Branch Friends, Students: free.

Contact jo.davies@raes-volunteer.org.

How Can AI Help Us Find Exploding Stars and Hungry Black Holes? Speaker Dr Heloise Stevance, Schmidt A.I. Fellow University of Oxford. 7:30pm. All lectures are open to the public: Entry for full-time students is free, other visitors are asked to make a donation of £3.