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Tell me a bit more about you!
I’m Shane Morris, I was a part of Loughborough University’s UAS Challenge team in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 and since graduating I’m now a design engineer at Spirit AeroSystems in Belfast.
I’m also a part of the IMechE’s Aerospace Division Young Members Committee and I contribute to the quiz that we run during the social night at the UAS Challenge as well as other outreach activities.
How has being a part of the UAS Challenge prepared you for working at Spirit AeroSystems?
For me, it’s quite simple; I like design and I like aircraft, so the UAS Challenge was a great natural fit for me. I love taking something in my head, like an idea for an aircraft, designing it and then getting it to fly, so the chance to do that and experience that process while I was a student was a no-brainer!
I’m very lucky in that I’m now doing exactly what I set out to do when I was younger; As a design engineer, I’m now supporting aircraft programmes like the Airbus helping shape the future of more efficient and sustainable flight.
Designing for the UAS Challenge also gave me a good grounding in using professional design software. I was thrown into the deep end of professional CAD design when I started my course and I was able to learn how to use Siemens NX to help design our drones. That gave me a good grounding for when I got into industry and needed to use CATIA; while I initially found it to be a very different way of doing design work, I definitely picked it up faster because I had that background of using an industry-standard software package.
Being able to communicate between different teams and team members is also an important thing that I learned from my time at Loughborough UAV and there’s a lot of similarities in industry. It sounds simple and obvious, but getting people on the same page helps identify potential problems and often prevents you from wasting a lot of time designing something that doesn’t perform as expected or that doesn’t meet the requirements of each department.
What would you say to a student who is thinking about doing the UAS Challenge?
If you’re passionate about engineering, I find this is a great outlet for that, especially as it’s directly related to some of your coursework as well as industry. Freshers or second-year students will really enjoy it, they’ll get a lot out of it; of being a part of a team, getting stuck in on a project, it’s great fun.
After writing specifications and get designs made up and spending long nights working on something, it’s a great thrill seeing your drone up in the air, it makes it all worth it. It’s so rewarding and such a great motivator to see something you helped design get built and actually operate successfully especially if it functions the way you intended for it to. The feeling of seeing the fruits of your labour and all the hard work you put in over the year is one that is hard to describe but it is a feeling worth chasing.
How can UAS Challenge participants learn more about Spirit AeroSystems?
The best place to find out about placements and graduate roles at Spirit AeroSystems is on their website, where they have further details of the exciting opportunities available.
It’s been great working on commercial aircraft at Spirit and while you might only be working on the design of a single part, it’s that you’re working as part of a much larger team and making valuable contributions to the overall project.