Case study: Flight Engineer Saves 60 Hours per Month, Cuts Data Processing Time by 80%

Dorota Kowalska is a Reliability Engineer at easyJet, one of the world's largest airlines with over 300 aircraft and operating around 1,000 routes across 35 countries.

Safety is the airline's highest priority, and Dorota's work focuses on analysing aircraft systems to inform corrective and preventative actions to ensure the highest standards of safety are maintained. She works with data every day, gathering, cleansing and producing visual reports from it for study. She joined easyJet in November 2019.

Collecting, cleansing, analysing and interpreting reliability data has always been core to Dorota's role at easyJet. And as her team began redesigning reliability processes, she felt there was never a better time for her to upskill and learn techniques to automate manual work.

That's why she saw immediate potential for benefit when, by chance, a colleague told her about Cambridge Spark's Data Analyst Apprenticeship. But apart from wanting to advance her skills and open future career paths, Dorota also saw the programme as an opportunity to inspire other women in pursuit of training and careers in engineering.

Dorota and her team use Skywise to process and analyse data. Skywise is a dashboarding platform compatible with Python and commonly used in the aviation industry. And because Python is a core first module in the Data Analyst curriculum, Dorota was able to apply her learnings in her work almost from the first day she began the apprenticeship in September 2021.

Learning some simple functions in Python helped her initially "play with", or manipulate, the data she was using in the workplace. She attributes this process of self discovery and experimentation to her ability to recall and implement her skills. Time invested early on in experimenting with code later later came back with interest, as she was able to build automations that saved time--60 hours a month!

Working with fleet engineers on performance studies, Dorota completed around 150 data analyses. Her findings even informed a broader business campaign to upgrade a specific aircraft part, bringing both improved performance and cost savings to easyJet.

As both a full-time working professional and mother of two young boys, Dorota needed a flexible learning experience to help her stay on top of her daily responsibilities.

She says EDUKATE.AI, Cambridge Spark's online learning platform, helped her achieve this in two crucial ways:

1. Instant feedback on coding assignments allowed her to make progress anytime, day or night
2. Support from mentors and the Knowledge Base forum helped her overcome challenges and solidify her learning