Day in the life of
Aviation Consultant – Ahmed Elnaggar
I have been working as an Operations & Engineering Advisor in the aviation sector for one of the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500 list.
In my job, I am responsible for supporting operations and engineering in the aviation business across our global operations across 55+ countries and 300+ sites, there’s plenty to keep me busy. Besides supporting the different locations and projects with operational and engineering input, I spend a lot of my time using my knowledge to create the blueprints that our operators and maintenance personnel would use across the globe to keep the business running with a special focus on risk prevention and mitigation. To perform this properly, I need to stay abreast of industry standards, technology changes so I spend a lot of time researching but also maintaining relationships with OEMs.
Between internal sites and external clients, I spend 50% of my time visiting different refineries and airports to perform audits and give recommendations on how they can ensure they implement and maintain the systems, processes, standards and equipment to have safe, timely and reliable fuel delivery from the refinery all the way to the aircraft.
The other 50% of my time is spent making sure I am well informed. This involves:
- Catching up on all new releases of industry standards, ensuring any significant changes are incorporated into our operations and those of our customers.
- Staying up to date with all new technologies, assess their suitability for our use, test them and then create the processes and plans required to roll-out globally (and then supporting and dealing with all queries that may arise post-implementation)
- Performing Safety & Product Quality incident investigations and root cause analysis and ensuring any learnings are shared and implemented globally.
Pros
The best part of my job is the global aspect of it, I love seeing my work get implemented and help people in so many different countries.
What I love the most about the role is how it forces me to stay informed and knowledgeable about the subject matter, it is satisfying getting such deep knowledge of a subject and seeing the fruits of that implemented globally across different regions. Also getting to travel and work across different cultures is a huge plus for me.
Cons
One con is having to work across time zones, early morning or late nights are pretty frequent.
Another con I would say is distractions, especially with most big fortune 500 companies moving to more agile ways of working. As a Subject Matter Expert in an agile organisation, you can get pulled to input and feed into many different projects which can distract from the core responsibilities so there is a risk of overworking or under-delivering on some aspects of the job which needs to be managed appropriately.
