Transcript
I always enjoy coming to work to be able to have a career that I'm proud of and enjoy doing.
I never knew it was going to be related to flight simulators, but I'm really glad it's led me here.
Hi, my name is Laura Bielecki. I'm the manager of flight simulator operations at Transport Canada.
I'm responsible to maintain the flight simulators here near the Ottawa Airport.
We have three of these. So we have two for fixed wing devices, a King Air and a Cessna Citation. And for the helicopter, we have a Bell 412 and a Bell 429. It looks, feels, sounds the exact same.
One of the very interesting capabilities of our new simulator is the roll on / roll off capability, which allows us to interchange the flight decks between two different configurations in this one simulator.;
The main benefit of flight simulators is that you can train pilots on a large number of malfunctions that they may not experience on the real aircraft, such as electrical issues that would cause our smoke generator to turn on and actually generate smoke within the flight deck.
And the more they train on these malfunctions, the more it becomes second nature to them.
I have a team of six simulator technicians, and we're here to run preventative maintenance and corrective maintenance to ensure that the simulators are qualified and ready.
I decided to go into engineering purely because I love my math and sciences.
Math always made sense to me, I didn't have to memorize any dates. It just seemed logical.
Subconsciously, I suspect one of the reasons I was interested in aviation was because my father worked for Air Canada as a machinist, so the aviation industry and aircraft was a part of my life growing up.
I had no female role models. I was very fortunate to be supported by very wonderful and strong men.
Whether I go back to my computer programing teacher or in university, but when I looked upward, there were no females.
So a colleague and I have started, we've co-chaired a new networking group called The Women of ASD. And ASD stands for Aircraft Services Directorate, which is the department I'm in.
In hopes of supporting and encouraging females within our organization and eventually, hopefully welcoming others.
I've worked really hard to ensure our team is well-rounded and diverse and different, and I think after all these years we've gone there and I think that's sort of what I'm most proud of, is the team that we've put together.