At the end of July, as part of the University of Waterloo’s Collaborative Aeronautics Program (CAP) supported by the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics (WISA), our group had a chance to visit Montreal and tour a few aeronautics organizations. We were lucky enough to have Bombardier as one of our stops.
The tour started with an overview of the company and a presentation from the Human Factors team. Their work looks at the relationship between the aircraft and the humans who assemble, operate, and support it. Specifically, the team analyzes how information is presented, how people interact with controls, what happens under high workload, and how design can reduce opportunities for human error.
After the presentation, we headed to the Challenger final assembly line.
Walking next to an aircraft while it is still being assembled is quite different from seeing the polished final product at an airport. Everything is open and exposed, and you start noticing all the little engineering decisions that normally remain hidden.
One of those was the aircraft surface itself. Underneath the polished exterior we normally see, there is a patchwork of different colours, materials, primers, and protective coatings. Different parts have different requirements ranging from structural loads, weight, corrosion resistance, and environmental exposure. Suddenly the aircraft looks much more like an engineering object than a finished product.
As we continued through the facility, we stopped by a small room where maintenance instruments and tools were kept. Here I saw one of my favourite ideas from the visit: a very simple system of colour-coded pins used to track equipment. When an instrument is taken, its pin goes with it, so it is immediately visible that something is missing and who has it.
It is a small system for a serious problem. The idea is to avoid forgotten instruments being left somewhere in the aircraft and to make sure all tools are accounted for and ready for the next day.
As we continued through the hangar, there were more examples of how carefully the whole production environment is orchestrated, including how and when aircraft are moved between different stages of assembly.
What I liked most was that after starting the visit by talking about human factors, we kept accidentally finding human factors everywhere.
Not only in sophisticated cockpit interfaces, sometimes it is a coloured pin that makes it obvious that somebody hasn’t returned a tool. Very different levels of complexity with the same idea: design the system around the human who will use it.
Thank you to the CAP program and WISA for making the visit possible, and to Bombardier for the tour!