The Society's Annual Forum & Technology Display is the world's leading international technical event on vertical flight technology. The three-day meeting includes more than 200 technical papers on every discipline from Acoustics to Uncrewed VTOL. Forum Proceedings papers can be purchased as individual pdf files or as CD-ROMs from the VFS Online Store.
Every year, the best paper in each technical discipline is selected by the Society's Technical Committees. All of the best papers from each technical discipline from every Annual Forum since 2001 – including the overall Alfred Gessow Best Paper Award since 2004 – are recognized as some of the most important technical contributions in the field of vertical flight.
The Forum 59 (2003) winning technical papers are linked below.
| Technical Area | Title of Paper | Author(s) |
| Acoustics | Transonic Helicopter Noise | A.S. Morgans, S.A. Karabasov, A.P. Dowling and T.P. Hynes, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK |
| Aerodynamics | Dynamic Stall Measurements and Computations for a VR-12 Airfoil with a Variable Droop Leading Edge | P.B. Martin and K.W. McAlister, Army/NASA Rotorcraft Division; M.S.Chandrasekhara, Navy-NASA Joint Institute of Aerospace Sciences and W. Geissler, DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology |
| Aircraft Design | High Stiffness ("Rigid") Helicopter Pylon Vibration Isolation Systems | Dennis P. McGuire, Lord Corporation |
| Avionics and Systems | Improving Army Aviation Situational Awareness with Agent-Based Data Discovery | Peter Gerken, Stephen Jameson, Brian Sidharta, and Joyce Barton, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories |
| Crash Safety | Water Impact Test and Simulation of a Composite Energy Absorbing Fuselage Section | Edwin L. Fasanella and Karen E. Jackson, US Army Research Laboratory, Vehicle Technology Directorate; Chad E. Sparks and Ashish K. Sareen, Bell Helicopter Textron, Inc. |
| Crew Stations & Human Factors | Pilot Attitudes On Glass And Traditional Cockpits In The U.S. Army's AH-64 Apache Helicopter | Clarence E. Rash, Gina E. Adam, Patricia A. LeDuc, US Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory and Gregory Francis, Purdue University |
| Dynamics | Validation of Structural and Aerodynamic Modeling Using UH-60A Flight Test Data | Anubhav Datta and Inderjit Chopra, University of Maryland |
| Flight Simulation | Simulation of Helicopter Shipboard Launch and Recovery with Time-Accurate Airwakes | Dooyong Lee, Nilay Sezer-Uzol, Joseph F. Horn and Lyle N. Long, Pennsylvania State University |
| Handling Qualities | Piloted Evaluation of a UH-60 Mixer Equivalent Turbulence Simulation Model |
Jeff A. Lusardi, Chris L. Blanken and Mark B. Tischler, US Army Aviation and Missile Command |
| Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) | Helicopter Transmission Diagnostics using Constrained Adaptive Lifting | Paul Samuel, Darryll Pines, University of Maryland |
| Manufacturing Technology and Processing | Process Development Through Simulation | Morgan R. Russell, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. |
| Lichten Award Presentation | Efficient Helicopter Skid Landing Gear Dynamic Drop Simulation Using LS-DYNA | Cheng-Ho Tho, Chad E. Sparks, Ashish K. Sareen, Michael R. Smith, Bell Helicopter Textron, Inc. and Courtney Johnson, Naval Air Systems Command |
| Operations | A Modeling Methodology for Manned and Unmanned Aircraft in a Close Airspace Enviroment | Daniel P. Schrage, David B. Stringer, Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Product Support | United States Army T55-L-712 Gas Turbine Engine Torquemeter System Test Improvements | Wesley Cass, US Army Aviation and Missile Command; Gayle "Butch" Echols, US Army Corpus Christi Army Depot |
| Propulsion | Experimental High Temperature Characterization of a Magnetic Bearing for Turbomachinery | Gerald Montague, Army Research Laboratory; Mark Jansen, Ralph Jansen, Ben Ebihara, University of Toledo; Andrew Provenza, NASA Glenn Research Center; Alan Palazzolo, Texas A&M University |
| STOVL/Powered Lift | Italian V/STOL Concept of the Twentieth Century |
Michael Hirshberg, CENTRA Technology; Thomas Müller, Salzmann Buchhandlung and Erasmo Piñero, Lockheed Martin |
| Structures & Materials | Fatigue - Life Predictions for High Cycle Dynamic Components Using Damage Tolerance and Small Threshold Cracks | Robert E. Vaughan and Jung Hua Chang, US Army, AMRDEC |
| Test & Evaluation | Open Loop Flight Test Results and Closed Loop Status of the IBC System on the CH-53G Helicopter | Christoph Kessler and Daniel Fuerst, ZF Luftfahrttchnik GmbH |
| Unmanned VTOL | Envelope Protection in Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles |
Ilkay Yavrucuk, Suray Unnikrishnan and J.V.R. Prasad, Georgia Institute of Technology |