From maintaining current systems to designing and implementing brand new technology, our engineers are a vital part of the work we do to keep the skies safe everyday.
Jack Macdonald joined the NATS engineering team two years ago as part of our Engineering Technician Scheme and is now one of our Duty Engineering Officers at Glasgow.
The day-to-day life of an airport engineer is varied, it sounds cliched, but it is true. A morning might look like this: When you arrive for work in the morning you enter the control tower and head to the engineering area. This is where you are greeted by all the rows of blinking equipment and control and monitoring systems. Then we head into our office to do our daily briefing and check emails. Whoever is the duty engineering officer that day would then pop next door to the radar control room and get a handover from the air traffic controllers to see what has happened overnight. At this point we formally take over responsibility for monitoring all the equipment. We then perform daily checks on all the equipment and finally start our day. It usually revolves round performing some maintenance on the multitude of equipment we have spanning communications, navigation aids, surveillance and data systems, or fixing any faults that have cropped up.
There are a small team of engineering colleagues that all do the same job but only one person is the duty engineering officer (DEO) that day. That person would be in charge and liaise with the controller team for any equipment being released from service so the other engineers can work on it. The DEO would also maintain the logbook to ensure everything operational is recorded. The DEO would mainly monitor the systems and respond to any problems from ATC whilst liaising with the wider NATS Technical Services team when releasing equipment from service that may have users outside of the current ATC unit.
It can be daunting, the responsibility of being DEO for the day, the sole arbiter between ATC and Engineering but I find it rewarding. This is genuinely a job where I feel I make an essential contribution to the successful running of the airport day in day out.
But if you are not the DEO that day, you could be doing any number of things from climbing radars, visiting navigation aids in remote locations, and driving down the runway measuring the signals from the landing systems. The list is endless and in my short time in engineering I have been involved in many projects working on a whole range of aviation technology, using everything from power tools to laptops and soldering irons.
In this role we also get involved with project managing, systems control, first and second line faults, you name it, and we’ve probably done it! You get a lot of training to do this job and that continues through your career with equipment courses and continuous assessment checks.
Ultimately it is a brilliant and very rewarding job. It can involve a lot of responsibility and decision making at times, as well as a mix of working alone or within a small team. But the variety of work is great and benefits of this career at NATS are fantastic. I would and do recommend my job to anyone that asks what I do.
Find out more and apply to our current engineering opportunities here.
