From Geography Teacher, Brad Thompson
Three Year 12 students studying Engineering (Joshua Cornelius, Will Cooley, and Lachlan Foley) were given an extraordinary insight into the aviation industry, through an opportunity to view the newest aircraft in the Airbus fleet, the A220.
Our thanks and acknowledgment to Mr Gerhard Ramcke (Chief Pilot Air Baltic, and A220 pilot) and Ms Genevieve Laverdure (Airbus Canada) for their invitation and generous support of the experience.
Below, the students describe the day in their own words:
‘We departed the Pullman hotel in a luxury Mercedes van designated for VIPs. After a rundown of operations and the plane’s route and interesting facts, we arrived at Sydney Airport where we had to go through two security gates. Once through the gates, we got a security escort onto the tarmac where we traveled to the Airbus A220. On the plane, we entered the cockpit and were briefed by the chief pilot of Air Baltic on the latest systems that were developed new to the Airbus fleet’.
‘The Airbus A220 is Airbus’s flagship medium-range plane. We were able to see the bleeding edge of technology from one of the world’s leading plane manufacturers. As we toured about the aeronautical systems aboard the plane we were shown the innovative products which are currently being designed in the industry. With almost the whole plane being controlled by computers and having little human influence on the plane’s movements it shows the crazy things engineers are doing with their free time. The plane is designed to fly 150 passengers for a 6-hour flight, this opens up new routes from Australia to the Asia Pacific and Oceania. It just so happened that we were there the day that the Qantas team were looking at the plane, 300 business persons were brought in busloads to observe the brand new plane. This allowed us to see how the marketplace works for planes, this can similarly be applied to other engineered products’.
