Profile

Hiya, I’m Ed and I’m an Aerospace engineer, working for a large company called Thales. We make loads of different things, but I work for the part of the company that makes controls for pilots, something we call avionics. Loads of engineers help to design the equipment, all doing different things. My work focusses on making sure that the avionics keep working in all environments, no matter how extreme they get!

Lets have a look at an example. Right now I’m working on new controls for an army helicopter called a Chinook, shown below.

What would happen to all those screens and controls if lightning hit the helicopter? What if it’s really cold, really hot or really wet? look at what happens when the Chinook lands in the desert, the sand gets everywhere! will that cause our avionics any problems? These are just a few of the questions I have to answer by testing the equipment .

So how do we test it? Well I don’t go flying through lightning storms, that would be pretty risky (and I like my life!). Instead, all the different bits of the cockpit are put into test chambers where we reproduce the environmental effects. For example for the sand problem we use a special sand chamber which blasts sand and dust at the equipment, while we perform tests to make sure it is still working properly. We make a list of all the environments that we think the equipment would encounter, find a chamber for each one and then test them all in this way. Another example is shown below, where equipment is being tested for humid environments like rain forests where we’d expect a lot of water vapour in the air.

I usually get in for 8.30, but I can start any time between 7.30 and 9.30, the earlier I start though the earlier I can go home!

I check through my emails for about half an hour. I usually get some from other engineers on the project asking questions about some testing, and some from managers asking how things are going. The project is a big team effort, there are over 20 engineers working on different parts of the cockpit, so communication is very important.

I might spend most of a morning checking through test results to make sure the equipment has passed. The customer tells us what environments they want the equipment to work in, specifying the test limits. I check that the testing we have performed meets their requirements and put it all into a report, showing them that we’ve done exactly what they asked and that the controls were still working afterwards.

I’ve got loads of friends around the office roughly the same age, about 50 graduates started when I did, so I might have a quick coffee break with some of them mid morning. It’s a big open office and as long as you get your work done on time you are pretty much free to roam around and chat, its all very relaxed.

At 12.00 I break for lunch. There’s a canteen where I buy food and hang out with mates for half an hour. It isn’t like school, you are free to take lunch when you want and for between half an hour and one hour in length, its completely up to you to manage your own time.

In the afternoon I might have a meeting, these are pretty regular. I would take in a summary of my work and update managers and other colleagues on progress. If there are any issues or I’m confused about something I can also use the meeting to bring up my problems.

I normal make a few phone calls and send out emails during the day to test sites. We cant do all the tests at our company as we don’t have all the equipment we need, so we have to pay other companies to do the testing for us. I sometimes go on trips to visit these other companies to make sure everything is going ok.

Finally, if I’m lucky, I get to go and have a quick play on the cockpit before heading home! we don’t have the helicopters in our building but we set up a pretend cockpit with all the equipment and run a flight simulator to test it and make sure my environmental work hasn’t broken anything.

I finish at 4.30, and then thats it for me. The work I do is classified so I’m not allowed to take it home… and you know what that means.. no homework! The company runs lots of sports clubs so I usually play a bit of tennis or squash after work with some of my colleagues before heading home for some Netflix and tea!