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 Unmanned Systems. Forum Proceedings papers can be purchased as individual pdf files or as CD-ROMs from the AHS 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 2004 – are recognized as some of the most important technical contributions in the field of vertical flight.
The Forum 69 (2013) winning technical papers are linked below.
| Technical Area | Title of Paper | Author(s) |
| Winner of the Alfred Gessow Forum Best Paper Award (Unmanned VTOL Aircraft) |
Flight Test Results for Autonomous Obstacle Field Navigation and Landing Site Selection on the RASCAL JUH-60A | Matthew Whalley, Marc Takahashi, Jay Fletcher, Ernesto Moralez III, Carl Ott, and Michael Olmstead, US Army AFDD; Chad L. Goerzen and Gregory J. Schulein, San Jose State University; James C. Savage, Air Force Research Laboratory; Hoyt N. Burns and Bill Conrad, H.N. Burns Engineering Corp. |
| Acoustics | Full-scale Rotorcraft Broadband Noise Prediction and Its Relevance to Civil Noise Certification Criteria | Royce Snider, Timothy Samuels, and Benjamin Goldman, Bell Helicopter Textron Inc.; Kenneth Brentner, The Pennsylvania State University |
| Advanced Vertical Flight | Control and Stability Characteristics of Gamera II: A Human Powered Helicopter | William Staruk, Joseph Schmaus, Ananth Sridharan, and Cody Karcher, University of Maryland |
| Aerodynamics | Helicopter Fuselage Drag Reduction Using Active Flow Control: a Comprehensive Experimental Investigation | Arnaud Le Pape, Caroline Lienard, Christophe Verbeke, Marc Pruvost, Jean-Luc De Coninck, ONERA |
| Aircraft Design | Conceptual Design of an Edgewise Mission Adaptive Rotor | Friedrich Straub, Ram JanakiRam, Thomas Zientek, Robert Maciolek, and Terrence Birchette, The Boeing Company |
| Avionics and Systems | Upgrade of the Transport Helicopter CH-53G with an Automatic Flight Control System - A Long-Serving Workhorse Gets a New Brain | Bernhard Stahuber, Rainer Rebstock, Konstantine Kampa and Manuel Stölzle, Eurocopter Deutschland GmbH |
| Crash Safety | Bird Strike Simulation for Helicopter Rotor Blades | Mukesh Surana, Cheng-Ho Tho, and Michael R. Smith, Bell Helicopter |
| Crew Stations and Human Factors | Feedforward and Feedback Control Behavior in Helicopter Pilots during a Lateral Reposition Task | Frank Drop and Heinrich Bülthoff, MPI for Biological Cybernetics and Daan Pool, Rene van Paassen, Max Mulder, Delft University of Technology |
| Dynamics | Investigation of Maximum Blade Loading Capability of Lift-Offset Rotors | Hyeonsoo Yeo, US Army; Wayne Johnson, NASA |
| Handling Qualities | Prediction of Rotorcraft Pilot-Induced Oscillations Using the Phase-Aggression Criterion | Michael Jones and Michael Jump, University of Liverpool |
| Health and Usage Monitoring Systems | Flight Test of Technology for Virtual Monitoring of Loads | Joshua D. Isom, United Technologies Research Center; Mark W. Davis, James P. Cycon, and James N. Rozak, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation; Jay W. Fletcher, U.S. Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate |
| History | An Interview with Major General Patrick H. Brady, Dust Off Innovator and Medal of Honor Recipient | Paul J. Fardink |
| Manufacturing Technology | Integrated Manufacturing Planning Approach for a High-Mix, Low-Volume Product Mix | Kevin Worrell, Jerry Nanni, and Luke Dixon, Bell Helicopter |
| Modeling and Simulation | Simulation System Fidelity Assessment at the Vertical Motion Simulator | Steven Beard, Scott Reardon and Bimal Aponso, NASA Ames Research Center; Eric Tobias, San Jose State University Foundation |
| Operations | The Key Facts of Helicopter-Ship Qualification Testing | Lieutenant Alrik Hoencamp, Netherlands Defense Academy; Marilena D. Pavel, Delft University of Technology; Douwe Stapersma, Netherlands Defense Academy |
| Product Support Systems Technology | Repair of Thin Sheet Ti-6AI/4V Firewalls Using Laser Welding | M.R. Urban and W. Harris, Sikorsky Aircraft; H. Brody, R Hebert, and K. Kazerounian, University of Connecticut; H. Orr, KTI Inc. |
| Propulsion | A New Methodology for Determining the Optimal Rotational Speed of a Variable RPM Main Rotor/Turboshaft Engine System | Gianluigi A. Misté, Università degli Studi di Padova; Andrea Garavello, HIT09 S.r.l.; Ernesto Benini, Università degli Studi di Padova; Maria Gonzalez-Alcoy, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid |
| Structures and Materials | Effects of Defects on Interlaminar Tensile Behavior in Carbon/Epoxy Composites | Yuri Nikishkov, Guillaume Seon, and Andrew Makeev, University of Texas at Arlington |
| Systems Engineering | Analysis of Mixed Critical Avionics and Systems | Chris Walter and Brian LaValley, WW Technology Group |
| Test and Evaluation | Blade Tip Vortex Detection in Maneuvering Flight using the Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS) Technique | André Bauknecht and Christoph B. Merz, DLR; Andrin Landolt and Alexander H Meier, ETH Zurich; Markus Raffel, DLR |
| Unmanned VTOL Aircraft and Rotorcraft | Flight Test Results for Autonomous Obstacle Field Navigation and Landing Site Selection on the RASCAL JUH-60A | Matthew Whalley, Marc Takahashi, Jay Fletcher, Ernesto Moralez III, Carl Ott, and Michael Olmstead, US Army AFDD; Chad L. Goerzen and Gregory J. Schulein, San Jose State University; James C. Savage, Air Force Research Laboratory; Hoyt N. Burns and Bill Conrad, H.N. Burns Engineering Corp. |
| Wind Energy | Measurement of Dynamic Stall on the DU Wind Turbine Airfoil Series | Jonathan Naughton, John Strike, Michael Hind, Andrew Magstadt, and Ashli Babbitt, University of Wyoming |