PACNDT'98 - 1st Pan American Conference on Nondestructive Testing Toronto 14-18 September 1998 A Report by Rolf Diederichs - NDTnet |
Introduction The Canadian Society for Nondestructive Testing [1] hosted the 1st Pan-American Conference for NDT. The event emphasized the collaboration of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean region. It seemed that the majority of participants came from Canada followed by the United States with only a handful from South America and the Caribbean. As was noted in discussions, economic troubles in much of Latin America may be responsible for this. There were about 350 participants and 50 exhibitors - I had expected a bigger event when I made my travel plans to this event; I imagined it would be a big event like the European Conference which took place in Copenhagen in May 1998 [2] as "European Alliance". Attendance may have also been affected by the timing of the ASNT Fall Conference and Quality Testing Show, held in Nashville just a month after the Canadian Conference. Sparse attendance notwithstanding, the professional sessions provided an excellent opportunity to hear about the newest topics in NDT, and the unusually long 45 min allotted to each speaker gave us all plenty of discussion time. During the conference the amalgamation of the CSNDT and the NDE Institute of Canada [3] was announced. The implementation is expected to take a number of months. It is expected that there will be many benefits to NDT practitioners in Canada and that the unified voice of the new body will become a significant force in global discussion of the industry. In conjunction with this topic Mr. Douglas J. Marshall is now the new Managing Director of the NDE Institute of Canada [4] and Mr. Bruce Metcalf the new CSNDT President. I'd like to thank ScanMaster Systems (IRT), Ltd. [5] who invited me to present NDTnet at their booth, and Ed Ginzel (MRI) [6] who lent me a big screen. It is always a pleasure to meet in "real life" people I have only known in cyberspace. Some of our sponsors and representatives participated in the exhibition, including Panametrics [6], QNet [7], NDT Systems [8], and RDTech [9]. In a meeting of the PACNDT it was decided that the name of the organization will change to PANDT. It was also agreed that United States, ASNT will host the next PANDT conference followed by Brazil, ABENDE. PANDT be held every two years (unconfirmed). We express our gratitude to all authors of the PANDT which submitted their e-files of the proceedings to NDTnet. And special thanks to the CSNDT for not charging the authors exclusive copyright transfer fees! We hope that in the future other PANDT hosts will work as cooperatively with us or even better - collaborating with us in the planning stages so that all abstracts and full-text papers will be available on the Internet.
Rolf Diederichs
*The Photo shows the opening ceromoney |