Fred Abbink

Fred Abbink graduated in Electrical Control Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Technical University Delft in January 1968.

After serving as an officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy, he joined the Netherlands National Aerospace Laboratory NLR in October 1969 as a project engineer / project leader in a number of avionics projects: NLR’s moving base flight simulator, SpaceLab, navaid calibration / flight inspection system for the NL Air Navigation Service Provider, airborne computer based flight testing system for the Fokker 50/100 evaluation and certification.

In 1981 he became head of NLR’s flight testing and helicopters department, responsible for NLR’s laboratory aircraft, helicopter research, avionics research, military operations research and accident investigation. In the same year, he was appointed as part-time professor in aircraft instrumentation and avionics at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the Technical University Delft.

In 1988 he became Technical Director of NLR, responsible for the government funded research programmes and the development of NLR’s large test and evaluation facilities, international cooperation and quality management. From 1996 to1998, he was detached from NLR to become Programme Director Aeronautics at the German Aerospace Center – DLR, in Cologne. There he was responsible for all of DLR’s in-house aeronautics research programmes. In 2005 he became General Director of NLR.

He has been a visiting professor at the Institut Technology Bandung in Indonesia in 1983 and 1989, at the National Aerospace Laboratory – NAL (now JAXA) in Japan in 1992, and at the Technical University in Helsinki in 1999. From 2006-2008 he was President of the International Council for the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) and chair or member of a number of supervisory boards and committees, including DNW, ETW, AIAA, EU-TAG, EREA, ICAS, VKI, ANAE, ACARE.

After his retirement at the end of 2009, he remained active in the field of aerospace including a position as President Commissioner at the firm NEDAERO, Chairman of the Netherlands Foundation CompoWorld and chairman of the Netherlands Association for Aeronautical Engineers (NVvL).

Furthermore he is President of the Council of European Aerospace Societies (CEAS) and member of a number of European and Netherlands advisory boards as: the EU CleanSky 2 Scientific Committee, the Programme Council of the Netherlands Space Office (NSO), the Advisory Council of Royal Netherlands Association for Aviation (KNVvL), the Executive Committee and Programme Committee of ICAS and of the International Activities Committee of the AIAA.

He is Officer in the Royal Netherlands Order of Oranje Nassau, Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Honorary Fellow of the International Council for the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS), Recipient of the CEAS Gold Award, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS), Fellow of the (French) Académie de l’Air et de l’Espace (ANAE), Honorary Member of the Polish Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics (PSAA) and Honorary Member of the TU-Delft Aerospace Students Association VSV-Leonardo Da Vinci.