Lucy Mentoring Program Launch

The 2012 Lucy Mentoring Program was launched on the evening of Wednesday 23 May, and was kindly hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia at their Darling Park offices. 

Empowerment, support and development were the themes of the Lucy Mentoring Program Launch, an industry event launching a four-month-long partnership of creativity and professional development between current female Engineering and IT students, and females in senior management and technical roles from some of Australia’s largest organisations.

The Program Launch saw a record forty four students matched with mentors from twenty four private and public organisations, including Accenture, Alcatel-Lucent, Attache-Software, Boomworks, C Smart Technologies, Deloitte, IBM, Qantas, Unilever, Woolworths, Construction Assignments, Hurstville Council, Coca Cola Amatil, Arup, John Holland, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Roads and Maritime Services, Railcorp, Siemens, Ausgrid, Hi Fraser and event host Commonwealth Bank. With an excitement akin to starting a new role or walking into their first ever university lecture, students were matched with senior professional women who will mentor them throughout the program and share their insights, life experience and expertise. 

Students were treated to an official welcome by Executive General Manager Steve McGregor, a self-confessed “Male Champion of Change” from Wealth Management IT at CBA. His welcome extended to the students chosen for the program as well as the mentors who volunteered to take part, thanking all responsible for the Lucy Program at UTS. His final words to the students, “Accept this invitation presented to you tonight – you are the generation of female talent we are proud to encourage, support and develop.”

There was a line-up of inspiring female speakers from a range of academic and corporate backgrounds. Nur Oyman, General Manager of CBA, spoke about the importance of mentoring in her career. Her golden advice to the mentees was to “be present, and have presence”, drawing on her experience of how confidence is a woman’s secret weapon in the corporate world. PhD Graduate, Minoo Masihpour, echoed the same tune. With a background in research in wireless communication networks, her academic studies gave her the confidence “never to surrender”.

The Lucy Mentoring Program is an innovative leadership program with the aim to inspire, motivate and educate young females about the opportunities available in senior corporate and public sector roles. Both mentors and mentees benefit from the mutually beneficial relationship, with Sabina Bhuiyan, Test Manager at IBM, calling it a “win-win” situation. 

Her mentee, Michelle Whye, a 4^th year Bachelor of Science in IT student, could not agree more. “I feel very privileged to be participating in the Lucy Mentoring Program. It is very encouraging to have contact with women in senior engineering and IT positions because they inspire us students to join these non-traditional female fields with confidence.”

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Rear Seat Development Part 3

Previous blog posts about the new rear seat discussed the requirements and then the prototype design and testing, now we head towards certification and production. With the data from the sled testing, and feedback from the mock up we went through another round design iteration.

One of the surprisingly more complicated design aspects was the recline mechanism. There were a lot of design requirements that were in conflict with process capability, and it took several iterations to get a design that worked as expected, and fit within our build and assembly tolerances.

Recline mechanism installed on seat

In parallel to the more obvious structural changes, we had to update the oxygen manifold STC so that it could support 5 masks, and we also had to find a place to put a 5th headset jack. We ended up moving all the headset jacks to the inside of the center console with the thinking that putting 3 kids in the back puts little kicking feet way too close to the headset jacks.

There were a lot of structural design changes to the fuselage to accommodate the new seat. We had to add support and layup changes to the floor and aft bulkhead. This includes several new aluminum fittings. There were a few new composite layup tools including the carbon fiber seat back, and the recline fitting, better known as "the ears." All of these significant changes to the structure of the airplane is why the new seats cannot be retrofitted to earlier airplanes.

Clockwise: Inertial reel and tether attachments on the bulkhead, the under floor support beam, the "ear"

Layup tools had to be designed, fabricated and inspected, and with each layup tool is a trim and drill fixture. The "ears" are bonded to the fuselage so a bonding tool had to be designed and fabricated. Fitting all these new parts, and assemblies into the build process is another very important step. We need to ensure that there is balance of time/work in each station so that the parts flow evenly from one station to the next. Subassembly stations for putting hardware on the seats had to be created since they didn't exist before. There is a lot of manufacturing and industrial engineering that has to happen in parallel with the design team to ensure a smooth transition to production.

So with the final design, and tooling in place, we once again install all the pieces in a mock up to verify fit and comfort and begin the conformity testing. Conformity testing sounds onerous but really it is just common sense. It is verifying that the parts you are testing were built to the drawing you intend to use for the type design product. Bottom line it is just a documented quality inspection.

Left to Right: Seat base, LH seat back, RH seat back

Testing included another trip to the sled test facility (all dummy legs stayed attached this time) and also a series of static load tests on the seat belt attachments and the LATCH attachments. With all the testing complete with no surprises, it was time to write the final reports and submit everything to the ACO for approval.

But the project isn't done until it is successfully in production. To help ensure a smooth transition, we typically have at least one "pilot" airplane go through the assembly line to ensure that all the tooling and production planning work as expected. We also use this opportunity to provide training to the technicians and it also gives us a good finished example for marketing materials when the airplane is complete.

We ran into an unexpected issue when we did the pilot airplane.The seat backs didn't fit! How could that possibly be? We installed several versions of these seats with no issues in our mock-up fuselage. Well it turns out that when you hang an engine and a wing on an empty fuselage, the fuselage changes shape every so slightly. It narrows just enough at the seat backs that the interface between the recline mechanism and the "ears" didn't work. After measuring about a dozen airplanes, we found the width change was very consistent and we modified the ears slightly by trimming them, and now the seats fit perfectly. With a successful pilot airplane, and project approval from the FAA, we begin sending airplanes down the production line for 2012 deliveries.

An interesting followup, I flew down to Chicago for a business meeting back in March in one of the new airplanes. Our Chief Engineer sat in the back and absolutely LOVED the recline of the new seats as he did work on his laptop. Although my daughter has outgrown the LATCH type car seats and I personally wont be able to use it, we are all particularly proud to be the first airplane manufacturer to have it available.

It takes a lot of hard work by many people to do a project like this. We have very high expectations for the product we sell, but in the end to get compliments from the Chief Engineer, see customers using all 5 seats, seeing kids in car seats buckled to our LATCH system, and to get some recognition from the Chairwoman of the NTSB makes us all proud and all the work worthwhile.

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National Association of Women in Construction - upcoming FREE Career Talk at UTS

The National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) are conducting career talks on Wed 30 May at UTS (see attached flier below for details).

NAWIC aims to:

*           To raise the profile of women working in the construction industry.

*           To be a positive instrument for change in the construction industry.

*           To promote and share construction industry best practice.

*           To meet, support and network with other women in the construction industry

More information can be found on our website: www.nawic.com.au  or our blog: http://www.nawic.com.au/blog/

We have 3 speakers from construction industry leaders Auercon, Hassell and Brookfield Multiplex to talk to students about their experience since they have graduated and provide some insight into what graduates can expect in their first few years in the construction industry.

NAWIC has a wide range of members from the construction sector: engineers, architects, project managers, interior designers, construction managers, lawyers.

The event is free for all students with food and drinks being served after the event. There will be an opportunity to meet the speakers and representatives from NAWIC.

Registration is at http://www.nawic.com.au/index.cfm?MenuID=4&EventID=362

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SWIEIT Visit - Cheltenham Girls High School

The team from the Sydney Women in Engineering & IT Speakers Program paid a visit to Cheltenham Girls High School on Wednesday afternoon, to speak to the Year 11 girls at their form assembly. UTS scholars, Sijjal (ICT - Telecommunications) and Rochelle (Information Technology) spoke about their interests and experiences in high school which led them to pursue further studies in their respective areas and many other opportunities at university. The girls were very appreciative of the SWIEIT speakers' stories; and for many, their understanding of the dynamic fields of engineering and IT were brought to a higher level.

Thanks to Careers Adviser Ms Van Es for organising the visit, and the SWIEIT team (Sijjal, Rochelle, Shellee and Karen) for taking the time to talk to the girls. We look forward to returning sometime in the near future to speak to the Year 12 girls!

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Flap Relay Update

I last updated the flap relay progress with this post in January. I reported then that we had vendor selection issues and that continued through the rest of the winter. Progress with a new vendor was good but slow, but I would much rather take a few extra weeks to get the design right than rush something into production that doesn't work well.

We received the pre-production versions last week and they are now in testing. We are verifying that the product works as predicted, but also verifying the production test equipment that we designed and the production test procedure. So a lot of design validation and verification for these little parts, and it is expected to take us a few weeks to complete this and update any drawings and procedures.

Production lead times are typically around 12 weeks (hopefully less) from when we place the order, so I wouldn't expect to see new parts for a little while yet, probably the end of the summer.

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Engineering & IT Hands on Day for Smarter Futures

If you were around the UTS city campus last Friday 27 April 2012 then you were probably wondering why there were so many students around during Vice Chancellor’s week. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss a memo and class didn’t start back a week early- it was just one of the Women in Engineering and IT's bi-annual ‘Hands on Days’. 

The Women in Engineering and IT (WiE&IT) team invite schools from all across New South Wales to participate in a fun and interactive activities day, aimed at encouraging female school leavers to consider engineering and IT as a study option and future career. Students travelled from places as far as Mudgee, the Central Coast and Newcastle to participate. The activities involved many aspects of engineering and IT learnt through studying at UTS, and ranged from making prosthetic legs, creating computer games and apps, controlling robots and even how to make artificial hearts. 

These activities couldn’t happen without support from industry partners, who donate their time to talk to the students. Each year, WiE&IT encourage industry partners to run an activity, giving the students an insight into engineering and IT career pathways and an opportunity to speak to women already working in these industries.  Companies such as Thales Group, the Roads and Maritime Services, Engineers Without Borders, Thoughtworks Australia and Microsoft Australia all ran activities that taught the girls how engineering and IT are embedded in almost every aspect of our lives. The Engineers Without Borders team did an excellent job of reinforcing this, by proving that the majority of the world's problems can be fixed using engineering solutions. 

Nekisa Mostafavi, a 5^th year Mechanical Engineering student and a facilitator for the ‘Mousetrap Race Cars’ activity, was delighted by the participant’s enthusiasm.

“I liked that everyone was involved, not just the students but the teachers as well,”  Nekisa said.

“I think the ‘Mousetrap’ activity gave them an idea of how engineering [principles] can be incorporated more into high school subjects [such as, science and physics].”

At the end of the day, over 200 hundred students had learnt something new about engineering and IT, and hopefully inspired them to pull us towards the vision of Hands on Day- ‘Engineering and IT for Smarter Futures’. 

By Shellee Murphy-Oates

UTS Events Cadet, Faculty of Engineering & IT

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