What is life like working in your role?
I love flying and I also love being involved in the engineering challenge of aircraft design, it is the perfect career for me. Both roles are very complimentary but day to day life for each is very different. Every day is a school day, there is so much to learn and so much research continually being performed, you are never finished learning.
What does a typical day look like?
In my flying role, airlines run 365 days a year, I could be rostered any day of the week, for either morning or afternoon flights. I would prepare for my day by looking at the flight plans, including weather, notams, routing. Drive to the airport and meet the rest of the crew at the aircraft, there are over 200 pilots at Bristol, so generally I will not have met the captain or cabin crew before, so we introduce ourselves, brief for the flight and board passengers. We fly either 2 sectors or 4 sectors a day.
For my engineering role, we work Monday to Friday 9-5, the days are spent researching the zero carbon technologies, gathering information and have discussions with members of different teams, creating aircraft models and writing reports and presentations.