In October 2025 I completed the British Airways Engineering Virtual Experience on Forage. It was a structured simulation of real maintenance and supply chain operations, and it gave me a perspective on what engineering looks like at scale that lab projects and coursework cannot provide.
What the programme involved.
The simulation was built around Airbus A320 aircraft maintenance. The A320 is one of the most widely operated commercial aircraft in the world. The programme asked participants to think like an engineering operations planner: analyse maintenance schedules, forecast material requirements, identify risk factors and produce professional documentation.
The tasks included analysing A320 maintenance schedules across a six-aircraft fleet and identifying components approaching their service limits, building a Material Forecast and Planning Report covering replacement timelines and lead times, diagnosing component faults and producing Work Request reports in the format used by EASA Part 145 approved maintenance organisations, proposing risk mitigation strategies for long-lead parts and applying EASA and CAA compliance requirements to planning decisions.
What a C-check is.
Commercial aircraft undergo structured maintenance checks at increasing intervals and depth. A C-check is a heavy maintenance visit, typically occurring every 18 to 24 months. The aircraft is partially disassembled, systems are inspected in detail and many components are replaced on schedule rather than waiting for failure.
The planning complexity of a C-check is significant because many critical components have long procurement lead times. A landing gear actuator or an engine control unit may have a lead time of six to eighteen months. If a component approaches its replacement limit and is not already on order, the aircraft cannot return to service on schedule. The financial and operational consequences of a grounded aircraft are substantial.
Understanding this made the material forecasting task concrete. You are not just tracking what needs replacing. You are modelling a probability distribution over when each part will reach its limit and comparing that against procurement timelines to find the gap before it becomes a crisis.
The Work Request report.
A Work Request is the formal document that initiates a maintenance action in an EASA Part 145 environment. It must specify the fault description with reference to the relevant chapter of the Aircraft Maintenance Manual, the required corrective action and the applicable airworthiness directive or service bulletin if relevant, the parts required by part number and quantity and the category of licensed engineer required to perform the work.
Writing one properly requires understanding not just the technical problem but the regulatory framework surrounding it. Every maintenance action on a commercial aircraft must be traceable, documented and signed off by a licensed engineer. There is no ambiguity tolerated and no informal workaround acceptable.
What aviation taught me about my own practice.
Aviation maintenance is rigorous in a way that most engineering contexts are not. Every decision is documented. Every component has a traceable history. The regulatory framework is non-negotiable and exists because the consequences of failure are irreversible.
That level of rigour is not unique to aviation. It is the standard that any safety-critical or reliability-critical system should meet. As an Electronic Engineering and Computer Science student, this experience was a useful reminder that careful documentation, systematic fault diagnosis and deep understanding of failure modes are the same disciplines regardless of whether you are planning a C-check or debugging a microcontroller.
The difference is that in aviation these habits are enforced by regulation. In software and embedded systems they have to be self-imposed. The best engineers impose them on themselves regardless.
There is no git rollback for a landing gear failure.
Next issue: what Yunex Traffic and intelligent transport systems taught me about IoT at city scale.
Zac
