Prof. Ronald Slingerland

Initially I thought of putting this post in my personal blog, but then I realized that wouldn’t be fair to this great teacher of TU Delft. Oh, but I definitely had to write something about Prof. Slingerland because I will remember him as one of the best teachers that I had my entire life.

Prof. Slingerland died Friday, October 19, 2007 along with TU Delft’s Prof. Poppe de Lange, involved in a tragic accident when their plane crashed into another small aircraft in Lelystad. He was (only) 46 years old when it happened.

During this week I have spoken to the friend of mine João that gave me more details about the accident. He told me that the Lelystad is an uncontrolled aerodrome so that explains in part how could the two aircrafts collide. He also told me that from the collision one of the aircrafts lost part of its tail and crashed. This was the aircraft were the two teachers were. The other one had damage in the landing gear but it could perform an emergency landing and thus the occupants survived the accident. I don’t know how to put this, but why didn’t faith spare also those two great men?

I didn’t know Professor Lange so I’ll keep writing only about Prof. Slingerland. It’s fair to say that he will be sadly missed by his family, his friends and even by his colleagues of TU Delft. And even the aerospace industry loses because he was one of the few people that were considered a reference on Preliminary and Conceptual Design of Aircrafts. I want to take this opportunity to express my sympathy to those you knew him well and lived closely with him.

From the few times that I had the opportunity to spend with him, I can say that he was my favorite teacher of TU Delft and he was the person that I went talk first when I needed some opinion or advice about the faculty or even about aerospace in general. He always tried to be available and have patience to listen to me every time. He was also an enthusiastic of all matters related to aeronautics and thus that was reflected on his way of living and on the way he taught.

It’s still strange to me that he’s gone forever since I had a meeting with him in the week in which he died, so I can still see his face and imagine him in his office. It’s very sad that this has happened.

At last, I just want to add that I’ll do my best in my thesis (he would have been one of my thesis’ coordinators) so that he would be proud to be my teacher and coordinator.

This is my homage to a great man that was Ronald Slingerland…