About This Project
While I was in a project management class, my group was tasked with the project of finding a covid related problem with an aerospace solution. We started with interviewing industry professionals from many different markets including healthcare, military, shipping, manufacturing, and others. A common theme of supply chain issues and readiness to aid covid patients on top of normal patients in hospitals occurred.
We used an analytical hierarchy process to determine our problem and settled on finding a solution to the lack of resources that hospitals had and their capacity for total patients. After brainstorming and using the same hierarchy process to choose a solution to our problem, we decided to reinstate retired C-17 cargo planes for the purpose of creating a mobile hospital that can be rapidly deployed to an airport to aid an area or city with an influx of patients.
There were many financial considerations and changes made to the planes for this project. Our group was able to obtain more of a bird's-eye view or a project manager's view of a timeline. The most valuable things I took away from this project were honing my skills using SolidWorks. I had 6 years of experience in Autodesk Inventor at the time, but SolidWorks was a brand new program to me and was another tool to master through this project.
There was a lot of design hours put into this project from the whole team; most of us were learning the program as we went. Creating the wings and fuselage challenged us to learn the new tools and methods of modeling in SolidWorks. When finalizing the project, I also learned a handful of supplementary tools and programs used for creating the finished aesthetics of the plane and hospital equipment.