Aerobloggen

Hello again dear readers!

My thought is to shortly tell you about my home department, where I have been working for three weeks now, but to also tell you about our trainee assignment which Niclas so nicely left a teaser about last week.

My home department is with the manufacturing engineers working with the space and military production. Manufacturing engineers are called MEs for short, which greatly facilitates as manufacturing engineer is a long phrase. Anyway, as an ME you work very close with the production and the operators. The goal is to constantly improve the production by, for example, solving problems that arise – both urgent and more long-term matters and update the operation information material the operators have. I think it is very interesting and I am very happy that I get to spend another 7 weeks at this department!

Moving on to the cliffhanger – the trainee assignment. The essence of the project is to raise awareness and interest in the profession of engineering as well as technology in general. We are very interested and passionate about technology ourselves and we would love to inspire others to feel the same. What we hope is that we, through our project, will get in contact with high school students, who might have started to reflect upon over their future careers, and help them sort out the different paths there are to choose between in order to get to work with their interests and dreams in their professional life.

We believe many teenagers are nervous about their future (we were), that many teenagers are worried that university studies and the engineering profession might be too difficult or that the journey is perceived as too long and distant. Therefore, we want to use the project as a tool to reach the teenagers and help them sort out their questions about the future and perhaps also help them find and set goals in order to realize their dreams about future careers. An important part of the project is therefore to inspire and inform about the possible paths there is to take. Hopefully we can also spread enthusiasm and dedication to stimulate their interest in technology and take the first step towards successful careers.

It is a very exciting project and there is so much for us to do in this area. The whole group is eager to start and we truly hope that we will be able to make a difference, especially for the teenagers. I hope that we get the chance to meet at least some of you readers – and to hopefully get you as interested in the company and the aerospace industry as we are!

If this sounds intriguing – please keep following this blog as we will post more information about the project and different activities we will arrange, such as school visits and opportunities to discuss technology, education, engineering and other interesting topics. If you cannot wait to get more information or have any questions – contact us at aerotrainees@gknaerospace.com and we can continue the discussion together!

Now it is my turn to write a post – great! Our first activity week (which Andreas mentioned in the previous post) has just come to an end. It is during these activity weeks that we, among other things, can visit companies. In the beginning of this week we were in Linköping visiting ACAB (Applied Composites AB) and in Solna visiting SAS.

ACAB is owned by GKN and manufactures various products and components using composite materials. The composite materials produced at ACAB consists of long threads, so called fibers, made of carbon, kevlar or glass and are kept together by different types of plastic. A great advantage with composites is that they are light-weight and that they could well replace metal in many applications. It was fun to see a different type of production compared to what we have seen at GKN in Trollhättan. In particular, the material aspect of the visit was very interesting; to learn more about composite materials and its applications!

After the visit at ACAB, we drove our minibus to Solna where we met Kamran Chohan from the Lean office at SAS. He told us a lot about how SAS is working with Lean and how they are constantly striving towards fulfilling their customers’ demands and wishes. We found it very interesting to hear the thoughts and reasoning of an airline. Usually, you are on “the other side”, being a customer to the airline. Also, SAS is our end customer as they buy airplanes with engine components manufactured by GKN and so it was interesting to see what happens with the final product. By the way, did you know that in 90% of the world’s commercial flights, there are at least some component manufactured by GKN? I think that is really cool!

We are very happy with the first two company visits, we learned a whole lot and we look forward to getting to know more companies in the future! What we were up to during the remainder of our first activity week will Joakim tell you in the next post.