Hey guys!

It has been a while since we were out on our last activity week (our great Germany tour) but here is a post about the two visits we did in Munich – better late than never 🙂

We drove into a parking lot in a roped off industrial area in the middle of a residential area (or at least that is how it felt) to park our minibus outside GKN Aerostructures Munich. This did however not happen before we tried to enter the industrial area from the complete opposite, and wrong, side (we are blaming the navigator). Once we were in the right place, we met our two hosts – one of them was originally from Sweden. They told us so much about their factory and their products. The majority of the production consists of a range of components made in composites for the airplane wings. Two of these components are aileron and flap edge, which you can see in the picture below.

The ailerons are on the outer part of the wings and the flap edges are closest to the body of the airplane. By the way, the picture shows an Airbus A380 – the world’s largest commercial airplane, which we got to learn more about on another visit during our Germany trip (but more about that in another post).

Our two hosts were great and wanted us to have a great experience – both of their site and of Munich. Therefore, they were more than happy to help us find a nice spot to have dinner. We went to the English Garden and had a Currywürst by the water, which was awesome until it started to rain and we had to find cover with a bunch of Germans. We summarized the day as a great one – despite the rain!

The day after started in much the same way – with navigations problems. A very kind man helped us to find the right way to the visitors’ parking lot. He even jumped in to our car to make sure we got to the right place after having tried to explain the labyrinth of left and right turns. Once we found ourselves on the visitors’ parking lot we realized the spot where we had started was just a stone’s throw away, but the way there by car was complicated to say the least. Visitors’ parking lots in Munich do not seem to cooperate with us at all.

The company we were visiting was MTU Aero Engines, which is one of our customers. A large share of what they deliver to their customers is engine modules, the low-pressure turbine module for example. In comparison, we make components (low-pressure turbine cases for example) that are mounted into modules before being assembled into the finished engines. MTU are also responsible for the final assembly of some complete engines. It is relatively new for them and for this purpose, they have built a new assembly line, which is adapted to the operators and the product. It was very interesting to see how they had organized the line and to see how very flexible it was in order to facilitate the work for the operators as much as possible.

To conclude: we had two awesome days in Munich!