NDT and CM Conferences

BINDT recently held its annual NDT and CM conferences in Nottingham, UK. What did you miss out on? David Norton received his award for 50 years of BINDT membership. I can remember working with Dave back in the 1980s, which would seem to indicate that I am also ageing. NDT must be in the Norton family DNA, as Dave met his wife while processing radiographic testing (RT) film in a dark room. Dave is still active in NDT, much to his wife’s annoyance as she would prefer that he retired, and they have two sons in the family firm with a third new employee joining them recently.

Hannah, a member of BINDT’s Publishing Department, was present in the role of photographer and could be found taking images at the formal events and also in the exhibition hall. Hannah has a naturally inquisitive mind and was asking Patrick (Boulton) and myself questions about CM and NDT. Between us, I hope we were able to answer these questions to Hannah’s satisfaction, but I suspect there will be more questions later.

It was interesting how many little huddles of people were to be seen and how you could easily be drawn into them to exchange opinions. 

One of the new people I met was Dave Mandina from ASNT, who also has his own inspection and training company. He is a person with grass roots knowledge of NDT who has built a company that provides online training, backed up with the shipping of a sample to the student for practical training. Conventional classroom training has become a minor part of the operation, with most students using the online option. We left him with the application form for CEng registration.

One disappointment was my lack of time to visit all of the exhibitors, as there was an excellent range of products and services available. The number of practitioners seemed to be less than previous years but those that came into the practitioner sessions were good at asking questions and offering opinions. I was given the after-lunch session, where people can drift off, but I did not lose any people or send any to sleep, so that was a bonus.

Several people said that they read this column after looking at the jobs section as well as other interesting columns and articles and that NDT News is most interesting to them. The articles in Insight are too in-depth for some, but it must be remembered that this is aimed at a different audience and BINDT chooses to provide this service to fulfil its mission to promote the advancement of the science and practice of NDT, CM, diagnostic engineering and all other materials and quality testing disciplines.

As an aside, an unknown person returned to their hotel room at 
3.55 am and struggled to find the lock. They were not aware of how noisy they were being but most of the floor, having been woken up, were contemplating going to assist. Such is the joy of conferencing!

Practitioner Group
The Practitioner Group would like to be able to offer self-employed people the option of public liability insurance. To achieve this, it would be good to know those providers that have given good service in terms of ease of use, especially if a claim has been made, cost or any other significant factor that may be relevant.

If you can provide any names and contact details of providers (both good and bad), please email them to me.

john.moody@bindt.org

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