ONERA is celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2016. This event is an opportunity to ask ourselves about the place and evolution of research in the field of aerospace, especially in terms of needs and means. A key topic of these reflections is obviously the contribution of testing activities. Originally involved in all of the developments, they progressively had to face more complex requirements, as well as the emergence of competing approaches, mainly based on computation capacities and engineering methods. In this context, the 12th issue of AerospaceLab Journal proposes an overview of the evolution of testing in various scientific domains concerned by aerospace developments: facilities, methods, instrumentation, processing, performance, exploitation of data, new fields of research involved, etc. The purpose is to assess the future use of testing, either as the best or as the only way to meet a specific requirement, such as equipment certification for instance, or as a complementary approach to other methods, including their validation or hardware in the loop analysis.

AerospaceLab Journal, Issue 12, December 2016; ISSN: 2107-6596