May 2026 – August 2026 · Shanghai, China3 min read
Summer 2026 at Pratt & Whitney’s Shanghai Engine Center, a shop that overhauls CFM56 and V2500 commercial engines.
- Root cause study on a turbine seal repair. Run as Lean Six Sigma DMAIC, presented to P&W headquarters.
- First article inspection packages for the repair engineers who own the repairs.
- A bilingual repair work order built from one-line manual references.
- A new in-house repair carried through the shop’s stage-gate reviews.
Airlines do not throw engines away. Every few thousand cycles an engine comes off the wing and goes to an MRO shop, short for maintenance, repair, and overhaul. A repair engineer sits between the damaged part and the approved fix. I came in expecting R&D work on engine coating materials. Most of the job is referencing the engine manual and running quality checks to meet strict compliance requirements.
What I worked on
Training came first. Then records, which meant digitizing files and auditing tool usage. Basically secretary work. It showed me how records are managed before I had to depend on one for a repair. I also got hands-one work with repair equipment and automation robots deployed at the factory.
Then, I got to work on an ongoing repair improvement project. A turbine seal repair was producing too much rework, so we ran a Lean Six Sigma DMAIC study on it. Intuition pointed at one process step. Measurement cleared the likely suspects and put the cause upstream. Validation passed at every gate.
First article inspection is the proof step before a repair runs on customer parts. I drafted the packages that turn a repair procedure into criteria an inspector measures twice.
The last project was a new in-house repair that arrived outside the scheduled development queue. I drafted the quality plan, the tooling list, and the PFMEA for its launch review. The database tells you what exists. A mechanic tells you what is reachable.
The Ultimate Takeaway
An MRO shop’s real product is proof. The work largely involved convincing the shop, the customer, and the regulator that a repair can be trusted, one document at a time.