It has been a fun few weeks. I have been working on some new projects with new people.

Last week I had to inventory three 6’x6’ crates of merchandise from NetJets. They are old Citation (jets) parts, which the company no longer operates. It was a long process, three days! I got thru it though.

I even went on a business trip to Abilene, Texas. It is about three hours west of Dallas. Aviall does business with an advertising agency, by the name of Zachry Associates. The ad agency does all of Aviall’s print ads, press, sales flyers, and market research. I got a tour of their facility and got to see some of the work they were doing for Aviall.

It was a great experience! I really felt like I was an employee of the company on important business. We drove there in the afternoon, stayed the night, and spent the next day at the ad agency. I loved it.

Next week will be my last week here, and I must say it is bittersweet. I’m happy to be heading home and then back to ERAU, but I’m sad that I have to say good-bye to everyone here.

It has been fun and I’m very appreciative of all that were involved in making my stay enjoyable, work wise and other.

It’s hard to believe that the summer is almost over. I have only two and a half weeks left in my internship.

Part of the requirement of being an intern at Honeywell is doing a 3-5 minute presentation on what we did over the summer to the other interns and managers. Somehow, lucky me, I get to be the first one to go.

We are doing them on Wednesday so I spent some time last week going over my notes from the summer and putting together a few slides of things I’ve done. That shouldn’t be too bad though.

I’m also starting to go back through things I’ve worked on to make sure that the work I’ve done this summer for the company is documented so that I can hand it off and everyone can continue on the things that I left off on.

I’m still working on one of the test stations that I talked about earlier in the month, we had some complications with the setup that we intended to do and that some of the components we needed would take too long to have built and certified. So we needed to rethink a few parts of it. We have a solid plan now and have the hardware we need on order. So that test station should be up and running before I leave (which would be nice to see after the work I’ve put into it).

Another task that has come up in the last week or so is that our program has a Critical Design Review (CDR) with the customer at the end of August. This is an opportunity for them to look at all of our final hardware and software configurations as well as our plans for testing the specific requirements they have for their units. I’ve started to pull together the information needed for that in a Powerpoint presentation that will end up being somewhere between 150 and 200 slides. It’s interesting going through all of the documents we have and tying to put it together in some kind of order that show how our unit works.

Well, I will most likely be working on the CDR and the final test station for the next two weeks. I’m sure it’ll go by quickly and I want to make sure that the things I have worked on are documented so that they don’t get lost.

Wouldn’t want anyone to have to re-invent the wheel on this project because we are tight on time as is.

Time is moving so fast, there is less than a month left in the internship.

It seems like I have been going non-stop for the past 3 months, which I have! My suitcase seems to always be packed by my bed ready for this week’s adventure.

I just got back from my international trip to London, best trip thus far. I left on Friday for the nine hour flight across the Atlantic. I met up with the crew at the gate and watched them complete the entire preflight from the walk around to all the paperwork. The flight left at 630 pm and arrived in London 955am the next morning.

Once in London I checked into the hotel and took the train into downtown. I had been to London before, and this time just wanted to walk around the entire city with no real plan. I had done the tourist thing already and just wanted to see the city by foot this time. It’s even better the second time. I can’t wait to go back!

I returned on Monday and was dead tired. That whole weekend I don’t think I got more than 5 hours of sleep. Once I got back from the airport I fell asleep and didn’t wake up till it was time to go to work the next day. I think I’m finally over my jet lag and just in time, I’m off to New York this weekend with some of my friends that are doing the ExpressJet internship in Houston as well.

Since my last entry I have also done the maintenance tour here at Continental. It was one of the best “field trips” thus far. They pretty much let us wander the hanger with 777s, 767s, 757s, and 737s all over the place! I have pictures of me inside jet engines, cargo compartments, on the flight deck, next to landing gear; it was so much fun (hope to share those with you in the next entry).

Well I need to get some laundry done and pack for this weekend.
Until next time, Bon Voyage!

Hey, so I’ve moved into working on developing test equipment and procedures for some of our units. I’m currently working with two projects on their testing needs and setups.

The first is a Space Integrated GPS/INS for the DoD that we need to test completely. On that project I’ve been working on making sure we are able to get the data we need on the hardware tests and be able to post-process that data after the test. The most challenging test right now is the spin test that we do on the unit.

We need to have data coming out of the spin table so we know what the true position of the unit is and then we also need to have the data coming out of the SIGI so that we can compare and measure the error as we spin it faster.

There’s a lot more to consider and look at than it seemed to me originally. All the data needs to be recorded at the same frequency and the data points need to be time tagged very accurately so we are comparing the correct data points from both outputs.

Along with that, I’m looking into the actual speeds at which we can go on the spin table. It’s not that there is a max speed, but as you go faster, you wear out the slip plugs faster (they allow cables to be connected to the device inside). So we need to determine how fast we can spin for some amount of time without decreasing the life of the machine too much.

The other project I’m working on the test setup for is the one that I had been doing a lot of documentation work on in my first few weeks here, which is good because I’m familiar with the hardware. What I’m doing with it now is setting up a computer station with the correct inputs and outputs so that we can run simulation tests on the unit and read data back out from it and see how the errors are

. The nice thing about the simulations is that we can put the unit in a variety of in-flight circumstances and see how it performs relatively cheaply.

The weeks seem to be going by very quickly here. I’m in my seventh week and it certainly doesn’t feel that way. But that’s good, they’ve been keeping me busy here lately, and I feel like I’m learning things every day.

One thing I’ve been putting some time in recently is developing some antenna patterns for our dynamic GPS simulations. Our customer for this project had sent us some data about the antenna they were using and I had to extract that and then, using some Matlab scripts, put it into a form that we can use in our simulation software. It was a good experience to learn how to manipulate data like that, and rewarding in that I was able to do it on my own, troubleshooting as I went.

Another project we’re working on is getting to the point were we have to start to develop testing procedures on the unit and the interface on this product is new. So I’m getting to spend some time in the lab configuring all the test equipment that we have to make sure that we can properly interface the unit with the computer and our test software.

It’s always interesting and a little scary to be working on something that no one has ever done before and that you need to figure it out so that the project can continue on as scheduled.

To get away from talking about work for a little, I just want to throw in the importance of having fun when you’re working hard. Something the folks at work seem to be able to balance very well. They are under a lot of stress of deadlines all the time and everyone works very hard all day long. But at the end of the day and on the weekends people go out and enjoy themselves. Everyone has to blow off steam and have some fun; it’s relaxing and improves the work environment I think.

So things are going great and work and they are keeping me busy and I’m learning, but we are also having some good times. There’s a lot to do here in Tampa if you know where to look.

It has been an interesting couple of weeks. I have been working on updating some existing flyers. Just getting them to look like the current flyers, so all is uniform.

I got to go out with an outside sales representative to visit a customer. We visited American Eagle.

Aviall offers a service, for a fee of course, called Estock. This is where the customer, American Eagle®, tells Aviall what they need to have on the shelves of their parts/supply room, minimums and maximums. Every week Aviall will go to their supply room and get a count and order what they need.

The customer has access to everything via an online database. No one at American Eagle® has to worry about keeping the supply room stocked or running out of something. This Estock program has been very popular and seems to be well liked by the Aviall customers that implement it. I

have also been working on a Michelin Tire promotion. When a customer buys $400 or more worth of Michelin tires, they must fill out an order form and they will receive a Michelin man bobblehead. They are also entered into a drawing to win a set of aircraft or passenger tires worth up to $1000.

My supervisor will be traveling on business for a few days, so I should be getting some even more interesting things to do. She likes to keep me busy, I cannot say I mind it at all.

I would rather be learning something than just sitting at my desk staring at the computer.

What a busy past few weeks. ETOPS (Extended Twin Engine Operations) class, CRM (Crew Resource Management) class, and next week the NASA pressure chamber and the Continental maintenance tour. On top of all that, my flight I was jumpseating on from DC to Houston was diverted to other area airport due to weather.

This summer I have learned so much about major airline operations, but then again that is the whole point of internships.

The ETOPS class focused on transatlantic routes as well as polar and Pacific routes. All of those routes are over water for long periods of time and before the current reliability of jet engine, no one would ever think of flying over water for any long period of time with only two engines.

Key points discussed are divert fields in case something does happen, as well as international navigation and political considerations for such routes. For instance on a flight from Newark to India, the flight is anywhere from 16 o 18 hours flying over the North Pole as well as Russian, Chinese, and Afghani airspace. All of which is pretty hostile.

The CRM class focuses not so much on the technical side of flying but more one the human side. This day in age, most aviation incidents are caused by human error. We live in such an advanced time that the biggest safety concern we have is with ourselves. The best part about all of these classes is that they are with actual line pilots. These classes have pilots in them and we are lucky enough to be able to observe these classes first hand.

This summer really is a once in a life time opportunity!

Yesterday the all the interns here at Continental took a “field trip” to the NASA Johnson Space Center. There we all underwent Hypoxia training. Hypoxia is a problem that occurs when flying at high altitude when the brain does not receive enough oxygen.

The first part of the morning was spent in a classroom learning about the atmosphere as well as some aero medical information on how lack of oxygen affects the body. After lunch the fun began! We got back and were fitted with a helmet and an oxygen mask. We learned how to wear them properly and how to operate them.

We then got to go in what is called ‘the chamber’. The chamber is a sealed room where the oxygen is taken out simulating the atmosphere at high altitudes. We were sat down and instructors supervised us as the pressure was decreased simulating the atmosphere at 25,000 feet.

Then we were allowed to take off our oxygen masks and perform some simple math problems as well as write our name a few times. After about 5 minutes all of us started to get a bit loopy. We were then told to put our masks back on and the chamber was ‘lowered’ back down to sea level pressure.

The purpose of this was for us to see how oxygen depravation affects us in our own individual ways. For me it was a warm sensation followed by a very happy feeling as well as worsening hand writing and those simple math problems became very difficult. I was having a ball with my mask off!

The best part was it was all videoed so we could watch in our debrief how we reacted to the lack of oxygen. We all then got our high altitude endorsements in our pilot log book which allows us to operate aircraft at high altitudes.

Everything we were taught yesterday I remembered from the flight physiology classes taught at Embry-Riddle. I remember sitting in classes at Riddle, saying, “When am I ever going to need to know this?”

And every day at Continental that question gets answered.

I’m now into the swing of things here. I’ve got a couple different projects that I’m helping out on and usually there is a decent stack of papers on my desk to go through. I’ve been mostly helping out with two main projects; the first is working on the initial documentation work for the project I spoke about last time. The second is doing testing on one of our engineering units because we had to do a software update for a customer.

Finally getting into the lab was a lot of fun, but also a little intimidating. To start there are a few different programs that I had to become familiar with to run the tests and to record the data we got out of them. For these tests we actually plugged simulators into the unit to simulate both INS and GPS data going in and were testing the software to make sure that in different situations we would have the correct data coming out of the unit about position, velocity, attitude, etc. Our unit uses the inertial data that it gets from the gyros and accelerometers and compares that with the navigation data that it receives from the GPS. It then feeds it through a filter of sorts and can get more accurate numbers for the position, velocity, and acceleration of the unit.

So what we do is to feed in data that agrees pretty well to start and make sure that everything is operating properly. The next step is to simulate different orbital environments to ensure that the data coming out is pretty accurate to ‘truth.’ The next step is to do different things to the unit like remove the GPS inputs for a few minutes and then turn them back on to see if the unit can still properly navigate with just the INS data and then once it receives the GPS signals to be sure that it properly reacquires the GPS data streams.

Anyways, after all this testing is done we have tons of data that we recorded during the test and we do what’s called post-processing on it so that we can look at how the device performed. A lot of this is done in Matlab and we get out graphs and statistical data from the tests. This takes a while as we had nearly 1 gigabyte of data to post-process. After all the data is extracted and processed it needs to be put into report format so that we can give it to the customer and show them how their unit performed; lucky for me I got to do that.

It was a really good learning experience to get into the lab and do some testing. The guy that I did the testing with was really great and made a point to really show me how things were working and what was going on. I think that the hands – on experience with the unit helped to give me a more complete understanding of how they operate.

It has been a while since my last entry! I have been sooo busy here in Houston. Busy enough in fact that I couldn’t even travel last weekend. Today I just took my checkride in the MD-80 simulator here at Continental. I passed and am now a MD-80 captain (I wish) but I did pass and my instructor commended my crew partner and me on what a great job we did. He asked if we had flown the MD-80 before and I said no, but Embry-Riddle does prepare you to fly just about anything.

Tomorrow is our LOFT flight which stands for Line Oriented Flight Training. We will be flying a flight from Houston to Austin and then coming back to Houston to see what pilots experience on a daily basis. So far in the simulator we have been dealing with emergencies, engine failures, and the like so it will be nice for a change to just fly and enjoy it. The best part about the whole sim training is that Continental uses the MD-80 for interview flights. Maybe if I am lucky they will still have it here when I interview in a few years and I will still remember the systems and flows which will make the interview flight that much easier.

Our instructor has been a huge help to us. He is a 737 instructor and really knows his stuff. Everyone here has been so nice to us. They see that we are interns and ask how things are going, where we are from, and then give us their business card and say if there is anything you need just give me a call. It really is a family here and I can’t wait to be a part of it.