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Benjamin Nicholls, flying officer.
At the moment I'm the aircraft maintenance
officer at 76 squadron.
So that means I'm one of the few junior engineering
officers who work for a senior engineering officer, who's a
higher rank than us and has more experience.
And we work on a day-to-day basis to maintain the
aircraft's serviceability.
I've got five secondary duties--
not all of them I work on all the time.
My primary secondary duty is OH&S officer-- that's the
operational health and safety officer.
I'm in charge of ground safety for the unit.
A few other secondary duties I have--
fuel quality control, maintaining the integrity of
the fuel that we put into the aircraft.
Weight and balance officer, which is ensuring that the
weight and centre of gravity is still within
limits of its design.
I've got ground serviceable equipment--
all of the equipment that you use to actually move the
aircraft around and perform maintenance on--
I look after that.
And I also am in charge of foreign objects to make sure
that items don't get ingested into engines, which can be
very damaging.
My section, which is the aircraft
section, has 38 personnel.
But I'm also in charge of life support--
that's structural fitters--
and they deal with metal work on the aircraft.
There's two of those.
So primarily I'm involved with 30 or 40 people directly
underneath.
I enjoy the fact that when I make decisions, it has an
effect on how aircraft are flying or how
we manage the aircraft.
And I find that a really positive aspect.
Well, we arrive to work and our main aim is to get the
aircraft serviceable for the flying for the day.
We arrive before the aircrews so that we can get the
aircraft ready.
We then brief the aircrew on what are the problems with the
jets, what are the positives, how many we've got
serviceable, and how many they can fly that day, and whether
or not we can meet their flying programme.
Then, throughout the day, I'm involved with
the maintenance aspects.
When we're trying to get the rest of the aircraft
serviceable, I deal with those issues.
There's an amazing amount of options to an engineer.
We have an engineering development programme, which
allows funds to be set aside for every engineer to do
professional development courses in virtually any area
of their choice as long as it aids to
developing them as an engineer.
I've done space concepts and operations.
I'm looking at satellite operations.
I've also done aircraft accident investigation.
The number of course I've done since leaving ADFA, not to
mention the course during ADFA, has been phenomenal.
You just get experiences everywhere, and any way of
your choice.
The opportunities to further your development as an
engineer are limitless.