Aerobloggen

Hello everyone!

Now we are finally here, and it’s time for us to take over the baton for a range of different responsibilities from the previous trainee group, which includes running this prestigious blog. We look forward to updating all readers on what being a trainee at GKN actually involves, but we thought we would start by introducing ourselves before diving into what we have been up to during our first six weeks on the job.

Who are the Trainee Group of 2024?

The Trainee Group of 2024 consists of six lovely people with slightly different backgrounds, but overall, you could say we are a great team that gets along well and looks forward to what lies ahead. We will probably talk more about ourselves in the future, but to give you a name and a face, we will provide a brief introduction regarding academic background, hometown, and associated department. From left to right in the picture above, we have:

David Attoff | Stockholm | AeroThermodynamics
M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, Energy Sciences, Faculty of Engineering at Lund University

Erik Juliusson | Lerberget | Program
B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management, M.Sc. in Management and Economics of Innovation, Chalmers University of Technology​

Hanna Gertsson | Skövde | Manufacturing Engineering
M.Sc. in Industrial Management and Engineering, Quality Development, Luleå University of Technology

Hannes Gustafsson | Vänersborg | Procurement
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, M.Sc. in Supply Chain Management, Chalmers University of Technology

Anna Lundberg | Gislaved | Procurement
B.Sc. in Industrial Management and Production Engineering, M.Sc. in Entrepreneurship and Business Design, Chalmers University of Technology

Måns Larsen | Svedala | AeroThermodynamics
M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, Energy Sciences, Faculty of Engineering at Lund University

The beginning to our journey at GKN Aerospace

Even though we have only been trainees for six weeks, it feels like we have already accomplished a lot. The first week was all about settling in and getting to know the company better through various presentations, team-building activities, etc. We also spent a lot of time with the trainee group from 2023, which was very appreciated as they presented material that they themselves wished they had received during their first time as trainees.

Furthermore, both the second and third weeks were spent in Gothenburg for a global onboarding for all new trainees. When we refer to the ‘Trainee Group of 2024,’ we are only talking about those of us based in Trollhättan, while the actual trainee group includes trainees from some of GKN’s other sites around the world as well. During these two weeks, we got to know each other better while also deepening our knowledge of the company through lectures from experienced and senior employees within GKN Aerospace. In the third week, we also met the previous trainee group in its entirety, which led to many pleasant acquaintances.

The fourth and fifth weeks were spent in Trollhättan on a so-called workshop internship where each of us followed the operations from different areas and product flows. This was very appreciated as it contributed to a deeper understanding of the core business. One thing we can say is that abbreviations are a big deal at GKN, so spending some time in production and actually seeing which details belong to which abbreviation was very beneficial.

What happens next?

We are currently in the middle of our sixth week at the company and have now moved to our so-called home departments where our first rotations are taking place. We have received our first assignments and are looking forward to getting started and showing what we are capable of!

More information about who we are, as well as our rotations and tasks, will be provided sporadically over time, so keep an eye out to learn more! If you have any questions, feel free to comment on the post, and for further information about the structure of the trainee program, we refer you to the following page (written in Swedish).

Talk to you soon, and don’t forget to like and comment!

Best regards,
The Trainee Group of 2024

Only 2 weeks left! The application deadline for our amazing trainee program is on February 15th.

Kickstart your career with an exciting trainee program at GKN Aerospace! If you want a challenging, exciting, and above all, enjoyable everyday life, then this position is for you! Go and read more about the program and apply here!

Why do this year’s trainees think you should apply to the program, and what are the biggest advantages:

• Develop tremendously in a short time
• Varied tasks, every day is unique
• Extensive global network
• International work experience
• Stepping stone to a leading position
• Opportunities to shape your own career

Apply now, and we’ll see you at the selection process in March!

/Trainee Group 2023

Hello everyone!

We are now 3 months into the trainee program, and a lot has happened as we approach the Christmas and New Year celebrations!

What have we been up to during this first period? Well, we’ve been involved in many activities. For instance, we participated as judges representing GKN at Lego League, where the winning team received a prize sponsored by GKN. A few weeks ago, we also went on a study visit to Såtenäs, where we had the exciting opportunity to witness the Saab 39 Gripen take off! This week, we will be hosting the trainee group from Siemens Energy here at Stallbacka to showcase our operations and share more about GKN.

We are currently in the midst of our first rotations, which are approaching their conclusion. It’s time to start looking for new assignments for the next rotation, starting in mid-January for most of us. Here’s a glimpse into what each trainee has been up to during their first rotation:

Elin: With a background in Logistics, it’s no surprise that my first rotation is in logistics, specifically in the Supply Chain Management department. In manufacturing companies with various products, bottlenecks can sometimes occur. My main task during this rotation is to delve deeper into one of these bottlenecks, map and investigate whether we can “widen” the bottleneck through a different or new approach, thereby creating a more stable flow of manufactured products.

Lisa: My first rotation is in the Government and Space program. The program is the business side of the company, involving a lot of customer interaction, negotiation, follow-up, and contract delivery. My mission during this rotation is to explore digitalization possibilities within the business and investigate efficient ways to handle commercial documents. I also assist with quotation work.

Oskar: During the first three months of the Global Graduate program, I’ve worked as a Systems Engineer in the Performance and Controls department. This high-tech department deals with complex issues related to control systems and engine performance. I’ve worked in a relatively small team with incredibly experienced colleagues, providing a solid platform for learning. This period has also given me insight into strategically conducting technical development work in the organization. I’ve had a lot of fun in the department and look forward to applying the lessons learned to my future rotations.

Per-Emil: My first months are spent as a Cost Engineer. In concrete projects at GKN, cost and efficiency are crucial factors. The department I work in supports the majority of projects by creating cost estimates for individual products at different stages. It’s essential to understand the entire production process, identify cost-driving and time-consuming operations, and suggest efficiencies. From my perspective, it’s been very enjoyable to be part of all this. I’ve received a thorough “crash course” in the manufacturing of various components, which I will carry with me to future rotations.

Martin: My first rotation is in the Aerodynamics department. As the name suggests, I work on evaluating the aerodynamics of our components. This rotation mostly involves learning about the workflow for evaluating deviations on a TEC-24k (Turbine Exhaust Case, thrust 24000 lbf). A turbine exhaust case is a structure that directs the air and is placed at the rear of an aircraft engine. This structure has the same function as a TRF (Turbine Rear Frame), but Pratt & Whitney calls it TEC, and General Electric calls it TRF. Practically, I mainly work on automating a simulation flow by coding Python scripts.

Axel: I am doing my first rotation in the GTC – Future Concepts department. My department is heavily involved in research and projects related to future aircraft engines and the aviation industry as a whole. My mission here is to model various emission methods for nitrogen oxides. Nitrogen oxides are one of the emissions, after carbon dioxide emissions that have the most significant negative impact on the atmosphere. Therefore, it’s important to investigate the subject and be able to calculate and simulate the amount of nitrogen oxide emissions in future engines.

Felix: My first rotation is in a department with sixteen engineers with different expertise in material processes such as casting, forging, and additive manufacturing. I specifically work on castings for the Turbine Rear Frame (TRF), which is a frame for the GEnx engine used in both Boeing 787 and 747. The TRF is mounted around the low-pressure turbine at the back of the jet engine and straightens the gas flow to achieve efficient aircraft propulsion. It also has engine mounts that allow the engine to be attached to the aircraft wings. The thrust at takeoff for the GEnx is up to 76000 lbf per engine, quite impressive!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from us trainees!

Hello all blog readers!

It’s finally time for us to take over the blog and share our exciting experiences as the new group of trainees here at GKN Aerospace. Let us tell you a bit about ourselves: We are an enthusiastic group representing different parts of our vast country, and our common goal is to make Trollhättan our new hometown. Although we come from diverse backgrounds, we all share a strong passion for the opportunities that await us within the trainee program.

Time has truly flown by since we embarked on our journey here. We are already in the fourth week of our trainee program, and we’ve had quite a few adventures. The first week was filled with company presentations and team-building activities, helping us quickly get to know our colleagues. We also had the opportunity to meet last year’s trainees while enjoying a round of adventure golf.

Exploring London and Bristol: Our First Development Week

Our second and third weeks were spent in London and Bristol for our first development week with the other trainees from around the world. There, we had the chance to deepen our understanding of GKN Aerospace through presentations and training on the company’s safety protocols and practices. Safety is a top priority for GKN Aerospace, and it’s something that permeates everything we do here.

In the evenings, our stays in London and Bristol were enhanced by enjoyable dinners where we not only savored delicious food and companionship but also had the opportunity to meet some senior figures at GKN Aerospace. These meetings provided us with insights into the company’s culture and values and allowed us to establish connections that will be valuable during our time here.

Weeks four and five are spent in the workshop, where we each follow a product and its production flow. The idea is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the products manufactured here in Trollhättan and an overview of the products’ lifecycle. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of the interplay between the rigorous product design specifications and what is actually feasible to produce. Many of us trainees will shift between design and production in the future, so understanding this relationship is of great importance.

Conclusion and Future Prospects

We are really looking forward to sharing our upcoming assignments and experiences with you through this blog and getting you to know us trainees better. Keep an eye out for more exciting stories from our journey!

Please feel free to comment with any questions or topics you’d like us to address in future posts.

Talk to you soon!

Best regards,

The Trainee Group of 2023

P.S. If you want to know more about us graduates, you can do this here!

Hello again!

Summer flew by, and so did our first time as trainees. Can you believe it’s been a year since we started at GKN Aerospace? I certainly can’t! Looking back over the past year, we’ve accomplished quite a bit. We’ve had everything from trips, site visits, training sessions, and various rotations. The year has been incredibly educational and fun, and we will look back on this time with warmth.

Right now, we are all in our final rotations, and if we look ahead a few months, we’ll be heading abroad for an international rotation, which promises to be a lot of fun! Speaking of international rotations, we want to extend a big thank you to the 2021 group for their delightful posts about their international experiences. We’re even more excited about what’s to come now… 🙂

Yesterday, we welcomed the new group of trainees to GKN and the trainee program with a round of adventure golf in sunny Trollhättan. And you, our loyal readers, know that when a new group of trainees arrives, the old one says goodbye! It’s simply time to let them continue where we left off and for us to turn the page and welcome the upcoming chapters in our trainee lives. Who knows, there may be exciting adventures just around the corner for us as well…?

A big thank you to everyone who has read our posts!

The 2022 grads: out!

Hey everybody!

Elias here, during the last six months, I have been in Germany working as a quality engineer at our Munich factory. In Munich, we mainly manufacture composite parts, such as, landing gear doors, rudders, and more.

In my role as a quality engineer, my job was largely administrative, mapping and seeing trends to see the occurrence of certain types of recurring problems, but there was also a lot of problem solving out on the factory floor together with operators, team leads and ME. Perhaps the biggest challenge in all of this was that all the work was perfomed in German!

As Merim has largely described what we did during our free time, I thought I could write a few words about our last work trip together as graduates, namely to Paris Air Show!

Similar to Farnborough, which we went to last year, the Paris Air Show is one of the largest air shows in the world. There are approximately 2500 exhibitors from 46 different countries that get together for one week to market their new products, meet suppliers and customers, and to sign new contracts. Moa, Merim and I had the opportunity to participate during the Friday of the show and see our chalét and all the performances of the different types of aircraft.

As I write this, I am back in Sweden and have started my first day in my new job as a Project Support Officer. With that said, our time has graduates has come to an end and we will be welcoming a new group of graduates in the fall. From the 21 grads, thank you, and like we say in Germany, auf Wiedersehen!

Alex here, just like Merim and Moa have told, the beginning of 2023 meant it was time to pack my bags and head on a 6 month adventure. I have been working on the US rollout of our in-house developed machine visualization software, and therefore my international placement has been in Newington, CT. The tool extracts real-time data from the machines without user interaction and helps operators by visualizing if the machine is running and predicts how long it is until next time it will need help from a human. The rollout also included visits to our sites in North Charlestown and El Cajon, helping them set the system up. It’s been a lot of fun working with people from all parts of the business while developing new functionalities for the software and it feels great to say that it is now live on all US Engines sites.

While the project was a big part of deciding where to go, the US have always been the goal for my international placement. I visited Newington during 2022 as part of my rotation in Supply Chain and really enjoyed the area and the site. Climate wise it is pretty close to Trollhättan but the seasons have more distinct roles and avoid taking each other’s jobs (looking at you +10 midsummer and Christmas eve). The site is only ~100 people, compared to the ~2000 in Sweden, which calls for a lot more cross-functional work and it is easier to understand the big picture, which I enjoy.

Work aside, I have spent my weekends exploring the area and trying the maxed out US experience with things like getting your own sofa at the cinema and 24/7 shooting ranges. There has also been a lot of bucket list hunting with New York City, Boston, Niagara Falls and Toronto ticked off the list.

A large benefit from the global graduate program is the network we build from day one. During my site visit to El Cajon I met up with the 2022 graduates for lunch and share experiences and I have spent a lot of time with the Newington graduate Jerin during the spring. Having someone on site to share experiences with and to hang out with after work have really enhanced the time in the US and I really appreciate everyone in Newington that helped out

Until next time,

/Alex

Hi dear readers!

As Merim described in his post, I am also on my last rotation of the graduate program, my abroad assignment. I am on a site located in Papendrecht, a small town in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands,  the products GKN manufacture are categorized into three different segments; Lightweight Aerostructures, Electrical Wiring Interconnections and Landing Gear Systems. These capabilities are distributed over four different sites, but there is currently a project of moving operations from two sites to Papendrecht to create a multi-technology center.

I am at the quality department in Papendrecht, working as the project lead for implementing new production requirements. These requirements are usually called SMS-requirements, where SMS is short for Safety Management System, and are a part of the regulation to obtain a Production of Approval (POA) certificate. To obtain a POA certificate means that the products produced are “approved of airworthiness” and the requirements are focused on introducing a proactive way of working to increase safety of products produced. The period for implementing these requirements is two years and my goal has thus been to gain momentum in the project.

In Papendrecht I am not the only graduate from our cohort, Amy and Erica from USA are doing their abroad assignment here as well. I have really appreciated them being here and it has been a lot of fun getting to know them better. About a month ago, we gave a presentation about the opportunities at GKN Aerospace and our experience of the graduate program to students from the university TU Delft during an on-site visit. Erica and I also went to TU Delft for a career event the other week where we had speed dating with several students and got to review their CVs. It is great fun to mix such activities into your work schedule.

A lot of fun happens outside of work as well. Since the flight from Sweden only takes about an hour, I have had the luxury of friends and family visiting regularly during the spring. Together with them, I have visited several different parts of the Netherlands, and of course seen TULIPS in abundance. Now there are only a few weeks left and even though it has been a lot of fun to experience all this, I am excited to go home to Sweden.

Until next time.

The time came for the year 21 to go on their abroad rotation. It was a while ago I wrote a blog post here, and I assume that you may be wondering what has happened since last time? Well, we have managed to do our last domestic rotation in Trollhättan, we’ve had our last development week which was in the US, we’ve managed to visit quite some sites around the world, examples such as US, UK and the Netherlands, but we’ve also got the chance to visit Farnborough Air show last year. When I think about it, quite a lot has actually happened during the two years at GKN, and after our abroad rotations which ends end of June, we return to Sweden and begin our post-graduate positions.

For my abroad rotation, my bags were packed onboard a direct flight to Münich where I’m to work six months with/at our customer ArianeGroup in Ottobrunn. If you read previous posts from last year, you would know that Jens, a graduate before me, went to Vernon in France on his abroad trip, and when I heard about it I just knew I wanted to go there. So when I got the chance, I gladly took it.

GKN has been a partner with ArianeGroup since the dawn of time (the 80s) and we have been part of every major launcher since then. The last renowned launch you might have heard about was the James Webb Telescope, launched by an Ariane 5. The successor for A5 is the Ariane 6, which is still in development, and for the future, we have the Prometheus project.

So for my abroad rotation, I’ve been involved in precisely that, the Prometheus project, where I’ve had to work with conceptual design on parts of the engine, which has meant a lot of CFD and design iterations. The people here at Ottobrunn are experts within the field of combustion chambers so I’ve situated myself pretty well here. It is a very exiting assignment, and being a space nerd, I feel that I have found the correct spot to be.

Except for working, I am also accompanied here by Elias, who is doing his abroad assignment at GKN Aerospace in Münich, where we are experiencing Bavaria. I really do enjoy hiking so I have forced Elias with me on some trips, pictures are below. To be in Münich is golden, you are very close to some pretty nice destinations. You have Italy, Austria, Switzerland, France and so on very close by but you also have the Alps very near, and of course the food here is not so bad. Golden to say the least.

I could talk longer about my experiences here, but I think this sums it up pretty well. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

Until we meet!

Linköping is a picturesque city located in the south of Sweden. It is known for its beautiful parks, museums, and historical landmarks. However, one of the most fascinating places to visit in Linköping is SAAB, the world-renowned aerospace and defense company.

Recently, we had the pleasure of visiting SAAB in Linköping, where we had the opportunity to witness firsthand the construction of the Gripen fighter jet. It was an unforgettable experience that we would like to share with you in this blog post.

As we entered SAAB’s facility, we were immediately struck by the level of security measures in place. The staff checked my identification and escorted me to a waiting area where we were given a safety briefing. Once the safety briefing was completed, we were allowed to proceed to the factory floor where we saw the impressive assembly line of the Gripen fighter jets.

The assembly line was a marvel of engineering, with machines and tools working in perfect harmony to build these impressive fighter jets. We were amazed to see how the different parts of the jet were put together to form the final product. The workers were all highly skilled, and it was clear that they took great pride in their work.

We were fortunate enough to have a guided tour of the facility by one of SAAB’s engineers, who patiently explained to us the different stages of the production process. From the design and construction of the cockpit to the installation of the engines and weapons systems, every stage of the production process was carefully planned and executed.

One of the most impressive aspects of the Gripen fighter jet is its maneuverability. The jet is designed to be highly agile, making it an ideal aircraft for aerial combat.

Aside from the impressive engineering, the atmosphere at SAAB was friendly and welcoming. The staff was always eager to answer my questions and explain the work they were doing. It was clear that they were passionate about their work and were dedicated to producing high-quality products.

In conclusion, our trip to Linköping and visit to SAAB was a memorable and pleasant experience. Seeing the Gripen fighter jet being built was a fascinating insight into the world of aerospace and defense engineering. We highly recommend a visit to SAAB’s facility for anyone interested in engineering or aviation. Since SAAB is a protected object, we couldn’t take any pictures so here is a nice picture of Arvid and Rasmus enjoying the lovely weather Linköping offered us.

See you soon!