Question: Which part of your job requires engineering studies?

Emma Bould answered on 13 Mar 2012:

Being able to understand how the systems work and how they share information between them. For example the Radar at the top of the mast is used to detect aircraft. There might be more than one aircraft around, so there is another piece of equipment which takes the raw radar information (Radio Waves) and displays it as a picture on a computer screen in our operations room. But, it doesn’t just display where the aircraft is. It also tells us how fast it’s going, what direction it’s travelling in and what type of aircraft it is. To do all of that, there are quite a few different pieces of equipment used to correlate (that’s match them up) with what the Radar is telling us. They all have to be able to figure out where in space that aircraft is and tell it apart from the others.

Ok, so that’s all really complicated…… but my engineering studies taught me the basics of how that all happens.

Things like passing information by fibre optic cable (that’s how the different bits talk to each other), processing signals (that’s how we work out which way it’s going), controlling the Radar Antenna (which is spinning around) and also calculating how fast the aircraft is going….. all those applications came from either my Physics lessons (all about Dopler and how waves travel through space), or Electronics, Computer Systems or Control Systems classes.

My university classes didn’t teach me about radars and aircraft, but they did teach me about engineering principles which can be applied to millions of different applications….all of which is basically what engineers do!