Question

1, Describe systems engineering and how does it impact your organization.

2, Discuss the role of the engineering department when planning aircraft facilities.

3, From an Aviation Maintenance Manager's perspective, what is the difference between a Technician and Engineer?

4, How does an engineering department evaluate support equipment?

5, When is the engineering department requested to assist aviation technicians?

Answer 1

1. Systems Engineering is the approach of focusing on identifying and satiating customer needs. It integrates all the various aspects of production like planning, designing, operations, monitoring, etc. to achieve the system objective of satisfying the various customer requirements. The seven steps involved in systems engineering are:

• State the system objective
• Investigate the system requirements
• Model the system
• Integrate the system
• Launch the system
• Assess the system
• Re-evaluate the system to check the achievement of objective

The benefits that system engineering bring to an organization are:

• The implementation of systems engineering reduces the design lead time of processes
• Systems engineering reduces the design changes of any process
• It improves the reliability of overall system
• Risk management gets enhanced with the implementation of systems engineering
• Decision making of business gets more holistic

2. When planning aircraft facilities, the role of engineering department is as follows:

• Ensure the aircraft meets the safety requirements as per the industry standards
• Conducting rigorous research to delve deeper into the functionality of the aircrafts
• Maintaining records of all aircraft facilities
• Reviewing all accident reports and conducting root cause analysis
• Conducting personnel training to keep employees updated
• Monitoring the aircraft operations so as to identify any probable risks

3. From the aviation manager’s perspective, the technician looks after the aircraft maintenance activities while the engineer is required to focus on the aircraft operations.

4. Major support equipment in aviation sector pertains to the ground support equipment (GSE). GSE includes platform ramp and the tools required for servicing the airlines between flight operations. Usually the support processes are outsourced to industry pioneers who are experts in handling such equipments. Aviation sector is an accident-prone sector, so there is no room for any kind of error. Regular audits are conducted to keep a check on the quality and maintenance of support equipments.

5. The engineering department looks after the training aspect of the aviation technicians. Various trainings are conducted to keep the skill sets and knowledge of the technicians updated. Also, when foreign equipment has been integrated in the aircraft, the engineering department is required to make the technicians aware about all the features of the integrated system. Similarly, the technicians can ask for any kind of technical support from the engineering department.