Aerospace Award
Open award for members and non-members
Award criteria
Purpose: The purpose of this award is to recognise a significant contribution over a period of at least 2-5 years to the NDT/CM/SHM community within the aerospace sector.
Eligibility: Nominees can be individuals or groups who have made a significant contribution to the NDT/CM/SHM community, either through R&D, through technology innovation development or transfer, or by developing strategy leading to new technology development and exploitation, or by contribution to standards, or by facilitating significant change within the aerospace sector. Nominations can relate to a specific technology innovation or for contributions to a number of innovations, including those providing significant contributions in a support role.
This is intended to recognise a contribution over a period of at least 2-5 years.
The proposer of the award should be a voting member of the Institute. If they are not, they will need to ensure the application is endorsed by an Institute voting member.
Details of the award: The award will consist of a certificate and free of charge registration at the Aerospace Event of that year, where the award will be presented. (For groups, only one person will be free of charge.)
Frequency: This award will be issued no more than once per year, but is not required to be issued should no one have been nominated or the Aerospace Committee does not feel any nomination meets the eligibility of the award. The award will be discussed at the final meeting of the year of the Aerospace Committee and finalised at the March meeting before the Aerospace Event.
Nomination arrangements: Nominations should be submitted by email to: karen.cambridge@bindt.org
Nominations for the award will be reviewed by the Aerospace Committee. If there is only one nomination, then the Aerospace Committee should vote to confirm whether the nomination is eligible and, if so, approve the award.
If there is more than one nomination, then the entries should be sent for judging by a panel set up for the purpose. Four members of the panel are to be appointed by the Aerospace Committee. Each judge will be invited to score the entries on a point scale of 0 to 3 and send the scores to Karen Cambridge, who will total the scores, and the entry receiving the most points will be declared the winner.
Awarding arrangements: The award will be made at the Aerospace Event (usually held in April) and will be awarded by the Chair of the Aerospace Committee. The winner will also be asked to issue a plenary-style short paper on the content of the award.
Committee: Aerospace Committee.
Winners
2026 winner: Tom Bertenshaw
The Aerospace Award for 2026 is awarded to Tom Bertenshaw.
Tom has been a practitioner of ultrasonic testing (UT) since his initial training started in September 2014. He then built up his experience hours (part time) over eight years to give him the appropriate experience to become Level 2 qualified. In 2021, he formed a small NDT department from scratch at GKN’s Global Technology Centre (GTC) in the UK, where he generated the procedures to conduct ultrasonic testing. He is now a UT Level 3 and the team has increased in size to three direct reports and one indirect report to help with the inspection activities. His current plans are to further mature the full matrix capture (FMC)/total focusing method (TFM) inspection of AM parts on in-house robotic developed systems within 2026.
Tom’s other area of interest lies in technique qualification, where he has chaired the British Institute of Non-Destructive Testing (BINDT)’s Technique Validation and Qualification User Group. He is currently part of the CEN TC 138/WG 9 committee on Methodology for Qualification of NDT, which has currently formed for the development of standards in this topic.
Tom joined BINDT in 2016. He has been assisting the Institute with its strategic objectives on and off since 2018, and over the last few years as Chair of the BINDT Aerospace Committee and BINDT West of England Branch. He has been coordinating Aerospace Events with BINDT for many years and has also run various workshops in the past on technique validation and standards (2022), additive manufacture (2018 and 2024) and simulation of NDT (2026), as well as compiling reports on two of these workshops. He has also presented at BINDT events as well as other events (International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing (ICAM)) on topics such as structural health monitoring, common file formats, calibration for radii in composites and design considerations for composite and metallic hydrogen tanks.
Through all this work, he applied for professional registration and became a Chartered Engineer in 2020 and this year he was elected as a Fellow of BINDT.
Past winners:
2018 No Award
2019 Mr J Biddulph
2020 No Award
2021 No Award
2022 Kevin J Pickup
2023 Jason Smith
2024 Guy Lawton
2025 Todd Parsons
