The future of maintenance!

 Good afternoon my aeronautics enthusiasts,

It’s been a very long time since my last blog and after this hole week of exams if I think it’s time to give some updates!

I must say that in Globalia we haven’t done many things in the last weeks as the exams were approaching, and we needed to give all our attention to them. In this blog I would like to explain you a little bit more about this hole weeks of exams. In my case, as I have all the other modules from the last course approved, I only had to go to 3 modules.

One of them was very easy and it was the Module 4 which is Electronic Fundamentals. It was only 20 questions and with all the knowledge that we acquired on classes and the workshop most of the class found of the exam quite easy.

The second one was Human Factors and, in some way, the test wasn’t very hard, again it was 20 questions. The difficulty part was the written exam which the statement was a little bit confusing, and we weren’t very sure about what was really asking to talk about. Nevertheless, we managed to write something and hopefully everything was ok!

The third one, and the most difficult one, was the Module 7 – Maintenance Practises. This exam consisted in a test of 80 questions and in a written exam of 2 questions, double than human factors. The written one in this case, even if it was two questions, I found it much easier than the question in Human Factors. For me the test was much difficult because in many questions there were two possible answers but one of them was truer than the other one.

After this hard week of exams, we also received our first instructions in how to do our final project for English. It consists in doing a project about an aircraft maintenance company and in my case, I would like to focus it in something related with the 3d printers. It’s been more than a year since I bought my 3d printer and it gave me the possibility to print many broken things with plastic. I even did a course for the Son Pacs teachers when I finished the first year of the course.

As the 3d printer can print almost whatever you design I thought it would be a great idea to implement it in my aircraft company. I’ve been doing some research about this technology in aircraft maintenance and so far I’ve found that Delta is using 3d printers for training purposes and they print everything in the hangars. They primary use the 3d printer to repair all the simulators where crews practise. As when you practise most of the materials tend to brake, it is much expensive to replace an interphone with a new one rather than printing one. I've also seen that it is a new technology implemented in the military and they print special tools for ajusting components or even covers for store components.

For the moment they don’t use this technology in aircraft pieces but I think that in a future it could become a reality to see 3d printed parts in interior of an aircraft. The 3d printers can print with plastic, resins or even metals so you have the possibility to print with many materials. I’ll be doing more research and start to prepare my project in a near future!

I hope you liked my blog and enjoy reading as always, see you on the next one!