| The European Facility for Airborne Research in Environmental and Geo-science, EUFAR (www.eufar.net) is an European Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (I3) for airborne environmental research. EUFAR exists since 2000 and coordinates the activities of 14 aircraft operators and 19 experts in airborne measurements, academic laboratories and SMEs.
As a EUFAR initiative, the COPAL Preparatory Phase (PP) project has been funded as part of the ESFRI roadmap, for the construction of an European heavy-payload (10 tons) and long endurance (10 flight hours) aircraft, while, today all the aircraft of the European fleet are limited to about 5 hours of flight and 3 tons of payload.
Both the EUFAR and the COPAL projects address the same topic, airborne environmental research, but their objectives are different.
After a brief presentation of EUFAR and COPAL, the coordinator will report on a survey that was recently completed on management of existing I3 and PP projects of the European Commission, to identify commonalities and differences in the management of the two projects types. |