Founding Members celebration
In March 2006, following a couple of preliminary meetings, 22 people representing National Aerospace Medical Associations and other European stakeholders met in Frankfurt am Main to sign the founding documents for the European Society of Aerospace Medicine (ESAM). Since that moment on, all of them started working together to work for health and safety for all persons involved in aviation and space operations, coordinating European aerospace medicine in the applicable fora.
Important tasks have been Encouraging dialogue between national aerospace medical associations and organizations dealing with aviation matters. Developing relations with EASA and other relevant national and international institutions and organizations based on the Society´s independent and expert position has been a priority in this work in the first 10 years of ESAMs existence.
The founding members supported by the elected Executive Committee started to work to bring together medical professionals to share their knowledge and promote scientific based aerospace medicine by organizing the European Conference of Aviation Medicine once every 2 years. The first edition of ECAM was successfully hosted in Budapest. Athens, London and Bucharest followed and grew with each edition culminating with this year’s edition organized together with AsMA in Oslo which brought together around 400 participants.
ECAM 2016 was the perfect occasion to celebrate 10 years of ESAM and gave us the opportunity to honour our founding members. Certificates of recognition were awarded to those of the founding members which were present during a ceremony that took place on the17th of September to honour and celebrate their contribution to the progress of aerospace medicine in general and ESAM in particular.
