Exterior Decorative Airplane Painter Training

For 7 years I did ID work for Boeing through Intrepid Learning. Over that span of time, I was embedded with a small team of other IDs in the Everett Paint Shop, as needed. We partnered with stakeholders to develop a wide range of training efforts to support painters and leadership. This meant being available across all three shifts when needed.

This included the development and maintenance of an overall painter training program to include:

·         Benchmarking

·         Classroom training

·         Hands-on practice and labs

·         Certification

For emergent issues, we would create crew briefs that would summarize a problem and define clear solutions. Team leads for each shift would then present the brief to painters before their shift. I would then take many of these emergent issues and create tips sheets. I also created tip sheets and trainings for new technologies and processes. If the content remained relevant, it would eventually be built into any updates to the overall training program.

At various times, I also developed complete training programs for the paint shop to include Rudder Shop Training, a complete all-encompassing Safety Course, and Special Finishes.

Additionally, I’d create special documentation to cover the specifics of a particular exterior paint design. Think of the Alaska Airlines tail. The shop may get a few planes with that design in a given year, but then may not see that customer again for a year or two and would have many different deliveries in between. The extreme level of nuance and detail that painters put into the designs on the planes is difficult to maintain as painters come and go from the hangar, retire, and as new people come into the mix. The documents captured the specifics of a particular design so that other painters in the future would have access to those details and keep delivery time as short as possible.

In general, this situation is a good example of when things like online learning or video simply don’t work well. The training was best delivered in person to immediately address questions from painters. The hands-on practice labs were essential to understanding the application of paint on an aircraft. The rapidly evolving nature of emergent issues meant real-time updates on a shift-by-shift basis.

If you’re interested in seeing how an airplane is painted, here’s a short video that I didn’t make but that is a good summary of the process. None of the work that I did in this phase is available to share because it’s Boeing proprietary.

NOTE: All images from existing online sources.