Virtual Engineering in Skills Acquisition and Development in the Career of the Rotorcraft Engineer

As the complexity of engineering systems grows, engineers increasingly need to be able to use a range of tools in order to reduce the costs, and associated risks, as they work in the various phases of the engineering life-cycle. In order to help engineers operate successfully within this product lifecycle, there have been significant developments in modelling simulation tools. Integrating these tools in a Virtual Engineering (VE) environment allows engineers to examine the potentially conflicting requirements of the different phases of the life-cycle, to develop a co-ordinated approach to requirements capture and product design through to identifying potential costly problems that could occur later in the development and operations phases. Technical skills development to use these tools is key to this process. This paper presents the experiences, learning outcomes and lessons learned in the development and implementation of bespoke rotorcraft engineering training programmes. The programmes were designed using a Problem Based Learning (PBL) framework where knowledge and skills are gained through solving problems. Four cases studies are presented in the paper, demonstrating how this PBL/VE approach can be used in the training programmes. Consideration of the future use of VE tools is provided together with future challenges for their successful application