Sheffield

The past couple of days I was off to Sheffield (not for the first time). We are trying to get some funding to do more airport related research, and this is in partnership with the universities of Lincoln and Sheffield. It was a fairly productive but very long day yesterday, and we have lots more work to do getting the grant proposal in shape. It's pretty hard to get academic funding (something like 1 in 10 proposals get funded, and you're usually up against exceptional people from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College etc) This is fair enough as it'll be a lot of money - three full time staff for a couple of years each plus various overheads and support costs. From my point of view it will be helpful to get it, as it would mean getting to carry on doing more interesting work, and would certainly help for applying for permanent academic jobs (universities like people who can bring in money - who'd have guessed?)

If you're staying in Sheffield, you might like to try the La Gondola restaurant - it was jolly nice!

This trip was done slightly more on the cheap than often, so my hotel room was rather reminiscent of staying in halls again. Did the job though.

The really fun part was right at the end of the day. The people at Sheffield U have a full blown flight simulator which we might use for this project. Here's a virtual landing at Hong Kong airport.

Beyond cool.