Editorial

Dear CIGRE friends,

Together with my best wishes for a healthy, happy and successful New Year, I would like herewith to round up my CIGRE life and experiences, so far, and to address an issue, which in my view is central to the values of CIGRE. I want to talk to you about the people of CIGRE; these lines are dedicated to them.

When I first joined CIGRE in 1976, then in the UNESCO building, and being somehow lost between admiration of meeting personally some of the greatest engineering personalities of that time and struggle for survival in the already then complicated CIGRE processes, I caught up a saying by my CIGRE mentor Dr. Walter Bückner (1922 ̶ 2016): “The benefit of CIGRE is half technical knowledge and half social contacts”. And as this has proved to be very true, I would like to dedicate this editorial to the people of CIGRE, particularly to some of those who have passed away and to whose I owe a lot.

In my December editorial I have already mentioned Walter Bückner. We have met in 1975; he was then the CEO of a renowned transmission line company and I was looking for a job. My first after my engineering degree. My prospects of landing the important position of an Export Manager seemed remote, due to my relatively young age and lack of experience, or so I thought. Walter Bückner thought differently. He gave me the opportunity to get into transmission lines, a subject about which, like any university graduate, I had not the foggiest idea. That was the beginning of a long journey together, during which Walter, the longtime Convenor of WG 22.04, “Endurance capability of conductors”, has always supported me. It is worth noting that he has published his last paper in 2002 at the age of ninety!

Through Bückner, I could meet another CIGRE legend. Jim Poffenberger (1920 ̶ 2018). His name is well known to all transmission line engineers, because of the famous “Poffenberger - Swart formula”, which is the industry standard for assessing vibration severity of conductors. Jim was an extremely pleasant person. Always happy to help newcomers in the field, like myself, always socially active introducing people to each other with his characteristic sonorous voice. Jim was also a walking library on publications on conductor vibration. When asked about a paper, it took him just seconds to provide the correct answer and, this was Jim, even offered to supply a copy - these were the days of the reprints long before pdf and email.

Another great person I had the chance to meet and to whom I owe a lot, is my late friend Claude de Tourreil (1936 ̶ 2006). Through him, I have entered the world of composite insulators, which has shaped my professional career significantly. Claude is doubtlessly the single person with the most influential contributions in this field. He is the person who has created the scientific and standardization fundament upon which this relative new technology could be accepted worldwide. And Claude was the person who would treat a novice, like I have been, as a peer, with the kindness and gentleness only he could radiate.

But also, my generation has been endowed with a number of great personalities, which I was fortunate enough to get to know well. I will mention here two: Dale Douglass (1941 ̶ 2020) and my close friend Umberto Cosmai, who passed away on November 29^th, 2022, from a complication related to Covid.

Dale’s knowledge and understanding of overhead lines, in particular conductors, was unparalleled. He could actually answer every question on this subject in a clear, understandable way, which only people can, who are blessed, like he has been, with a profound engineering way of thinking. He has been one of those very rare people, who combine a tremendous practical experience with a very solid theoretical background. Above all, he could share his knowledge with such a quiet, but at the same time sovereign manner, that at the end everybody happily agreed with him.

Umberto on the other hand was the undisputable authority on conductor fittings and conductor vibrations. Our close friendship went back for decades and during all these years he did not stop to surprise me with his enormous depth of knowledge, but also with his generous way to share it. Typical for his modesty has been his answer to me when I have sent him a picture of our CIGRE Green Book of Overhead Lines and thanked him for his outstanding chapters therein: "It is I who must thank you for allowing me to provide my modest contribution."

So now, you may better understand how grateful I am for being for so many years part of this exceptional organization called CIGRE, and how motivated I am to serve it with all my energy in the years to come.

Konstantin O. Papailiou