Aerobloggen

Last Tuesday we Graduate Engineers had the great pleasure of visiting ESTEC, ESA’s largest facility and the heart of their research and technology, situated in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. For those who doesn’t know, ESA is an abbreviation of European Space Agency and is the european equivalent of NASA. We arrived around lunch and was greeted by a few of their Graduate Engineers, with whom we had lunch. After lunch we had a lecture about the history and missions of ESA, followed by a lecture about their technology and developments considering Additive Manufacturing (AM), which is 3D-printing in metal, which is currently a super hot topic in aerospace and space industry. Apart from 3D-printing in metal, ESA are also conducting research on 3D-printing in materials found on the moon. If this can be made to work, ESA could send 3D-printers to the moon to 3D-print a lunar base. This way, the building materials would not have to be freighted from Earth.

After this extremely exciting and inspiring lecture, we received a quick visit by none other than Mr Franco Ongaro, ESAs Director of TEC. Even if he was quite a busy man and the encounter was quite short it was inspiring to get to meet him.

The day continued with a privileged tour around the facility, including among other things:

• Their CDF (Concurrent Design Facility), which is a sort of meeting room designed for lengthy meetings including lots of different experts, with the purpose of relatively quickly reach some conclusions on what the practical possibilities of different projects might be.
• Their testing facility. Here ESA conducts for example vibration testing, to make sure the developed equipment can withstand the strong vibrations encountered during lift-off. Another example is space simulation, where a satellite prototype is put in vacuum and exposed to extreme temperatures for weeks at a time to make sure the equipment operates as intended in space.

All in all the visit took somewhere between five and six hours. There is not so many times in my life that I’ve experienced something so inspiring as this visit. However after such a long visit with so much information, we all felt quite tired when we finished up.

Thank you very much for having us, ESTEC!

 

Over and out

/Joakim Åhman

After the two intense days of leadership training, personal development and deep dives into our innermost beings which David referred to in the previous post (and which by the way were held at the very enjoyable Bohusgården in Uddevalla), it was at the previous Saturday time for us to steer our big black van towards a far more far-reaching journey. This time we had our sights on an epic road trip stretching 4000km throughout large parts of Europe!

As you might already know, between our ten weeks work placements we trainees have so called activity weeks when we, apart from leadership and group development, spend our time building networks and increasing our competence by the means of visiting fellow companies within the aerospace industry. During this second activity week, as mentioned half of Europe lay at our feet and the first target was set at Fokker Services in Hoogerheide south of Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Because we had quite a few kilometers to cover, and since we were eager to enjoy everything the continent had to offer us, we started our journey early in the Saturday morning. After some pleasant hours of socializing and music listening, we arrived Bremen at dusk and had a nice dinner before settling for the night. At Sunday, we crossed the Dutch border, drove the last few hours into Amsterdam and even took us some time to fill the yearly cultural prescription by visiting the van Gogh Museum, after which is was time to prepare ourselves for a work week beyond the usual.A whole years prescription of cultural experiences filled in only a few intense hours.The well known Fokker logo and a propeller pwered Fokker 50 in Dutch KLM service.

The Dutch Fokker makes up a classic name in the history of aerospace business. The company was founded already in 1912 and has during the years of operation produced both military and civil aircrafts. Among the most recognized models, the propeller powered Fokker 50 and the jet powered Fokker 100 are to be found. Both these airliners have served as so called regional jets or city hoppers since the middle 80´s. Fokker delivered its last complete airplane in 1996 and since then the business focus is on the production of electric wiring systems and landing gears, along with the complete overhaul and service of both airplane structures and jet engines. In October 2015 GKN plc. acquired Fokker and since then it’s a part of our very own GKN Aerospace.

At the site in Hoogerheide complete overhauls of the full aircrafts are performed and the facilities have their own landing runway to be able to welcome the planes arriving for service. We trainees didn´t knew exactly which expectations to place on our visit at the site and we were happily surprised when we almost immediately nearly clashed with three big airliners already in the first of many hangars. As we in our daily work focus our attention on isolated parts of the engines, it was very much welcomed to see these parts in their bigger context, both in the form of close encounters with the mounted engines and as part of the entire airplanes on display. We were also given the chance to live out our pilot dreams when we entered a cockpit, and we experienced how an airplane cabin feels even narrower when all the seats have been removed. To state it short, the day at Fokker was nothing else but a great success!

Happy and keen to gain even more experiences we returned to Amsterdam in the evening to enjoy a cozy canal boat tour, while at the same time pumping our minds for the next engaging day to come!Beautiful installations at the Amsterdam Lights Festival.

As we wrote about earlier the graduate program is not all about exploring and developing your technical know-how. One thing that we are constantly working on is personal development. I personally find this very positive, as the rest of the group I have an engineering background and technical fields tend to have less of this in there scheme. To be able to handle different situation and have success in your career a knowing of different types of personalities are key.

During our first stay we covered the topic of what shaped us as persons. It was very rewarding both in a private and professional context. When we got together this time the topics covered where constructive feedback and personality types. We all had a chance to develop and practice our skills in a set-up environment based on the time we spent as a group so far at our graduate program. We had also the possibility to do a personality test to find out what type of strengths and weaknesses we might have according to literature. I am convinced we all received great insights which we can develop further and carry with us as we gather more and more experience in life.

Regards,

David

Hello Again

Time goes incredibly fast and it feels like you get to experience new things every day. In this way, supply chains and the role of SQA is very dynamic where every new day is different from the others. Now that the first internship is reaching is end, I thought that it would be a great opportunity to summarize some of the impressions of the initial time and my role as a future SQA. As previously mentioned, the role of SQA involves actively collaboration with suppliers and issues of quality, this leads to need of constantly keep up with the flow of information to constantly keep oneself updated. Practically this implies day to day work shaped by several emails, conference calls and other discussions. The funniest thing about this is that you get to meet a lot of different people, and especially people with deep expertise in certain areas, e.g. material or hot and cold structures. The opportunities to learn new things appears therefore to never be further than around the corner.

During the end of November and the beginning of December, I had the opportunity to travel on my first business trip abroad. It was a few days visit to United Kingdom to visit one of our suppliers. This was very interesting and educating, and we had good discussions e.g. quality and statistical process control. As you can interpret from the text above we also had several other discussions and a few visits to the manufacturing facility, but I also had a great opportunity to gain deeper insight to some of their data and measure some details in order to test an hypothesis we could decipher from previous data. This was truly educational and developing and I eagerly look forward to future company visits and business trips.

At the end of last week, it was time for the annual Christmas dinner, which the new graduate engineers host and organize in traditional Christmas spirit for old graduates and their partners. Due to my days out of office, I missed the careful preparations of the Christmas carols. I was instead in charge of the curtain, a crucial task for the audience to be able to take part of the show.

That was all for now, but keep following the blog, because soon there will be more post about the Euro trip conducted by the young graduates, and more information about some of the company visits we conducted.

Now I have slowly shifted over to work with the Aerodynamics Engineers in our department. Working with aerodynamics at a design department often involves the study of fluid flows using different programs. This is necessary to obtain information such as temperature, pressure, density and velocity of fluids, but also to optimize the profile of our products and minimize turbulence and pressure drops. Thursday last week my department (Hot structures) had a full day of activities outside GKN. The aim of the day was that the employees of Hot structures would get to know one another a little better, but also to clarify the department’s goals and strategies for the coming year and that these are in synergy with the company’s vision. After the group exercises and presentations the day was to end with a badminton tournament.

Because I’m the youngest in my department and the majority of my colleagues have a birth date as old as GKN itself (around the mid-1700s) the prognosis was good. However, after an extremely even group stage where I managed to advance on pure luck I unfortunately saw myself defeated in the quarter finals. Ironically, my opponent to beat me was our Aero Lead Engineer, the one I’ve been working with the last two weeks. The tournament itself was finally won by the department head, and whether that was a coincidence or not we leave unsaid.

I’m impressed by my colleagues showing both fighting spirit and good health not only on the badminton field but also in the daily work at GKN. Now we look forward to an exciting week of activities which takes us on a Europe trip!

Good day blog-readers!

The time on our first work placements is soon over. It’s just one week left until we change placements to our new departments. My new department will be procurement, with a focus on R&T (Research and Technology). Currently I know very little about procurement and economics, but I look forward to learning about it. As I don’t have much knowledge of the subject the plan is for me to act as a shadow to an procurement leader. I suspect I will be a “fly on the wall” (is that an expression in English?) in meetings etc.

I start at procurement the 19^th of December, but I have already made a surreptitious start. The other day I was invited by Anders Wikman (the procurement leader whom I will follow) to a meeting with a potential future supplier. Who am I to decline, I thought, and so I joined in. So yesterday we went on a day trip to meet the company. As described above, my knowledge of procurement is very limited and it was hard for me to know what I should look for in this supplier. Nevertheless I was brought into the conversation and apart from the experience being very interesting and fun, I also feel like a learnt a few things. I hope more supplier meetings will follow. I am a bit tense but also very stoked about my upcoming time at procurement!

Over and out

Joakim