Textron Aviation

Overview

As part of my first year-long rotation in Textron's Engineering Leadership Development Program, I joined Textron Aviation's Sustaining Jets (Dept. 347) and Part 25 Avionics & Electrical Systems (AES) teams in Wichita, KS, supporting the Citation business jet family (CJ4 Gen2, CJ3+, M2 Gen2, Latitude, Longitude, XLS Gen2). My work sat at the intersection of avionics wiring, data integrity, and internal tooling: helping migrate decades of harness data from HarnessSys to Siemens Capital Harness, and building a full-stack “Delivery Documents Tool” to replace a fragile, macro-driven workflow for aircraft delivery packets.

The common thread across these efforts was giving engineers, production, and customer service teams clean, trustworthy electrical data and faster ways to support aircraft builds and deliveries, while still meeting Part 25 certification requirements and special customer configurations.

Role & Team

I worked as an Avionics & Electrical Systems Engineer embedded in Sustaining Jets, collaborating with the Part 25 AES engineering team, harness designers, and customer service. On the wiring side, I supported the conversion of existing EWIS designs from HarnessSys into Siemens Capital Harness, validating harness BOMs, wire lists, COAX runs, jumpers, shorts, and splices as the data moved into the new tool.

On the tooling side, I owned the design and implementation of an internal Delivery Documents Tool: I met regularly with department leads, created multiple mockups, and iterated in an agile-like cadence to capture how different teams actually used delivery packets. I then normalized their requirements into an all-encompassing database and implemented the backend in Python/Django with a relational schema that could support multiple aircraft programs and customer-specific configurations going forward.

Highlights

• Built the “Delivery Documents Tool” full-stack web app (Python, Django, SQLite Database) to replace a legacy Excel-macro workflow for generating customer delivery packets, turning a single fragile workbook into a maintainable internal web application.
• Standardized delivery-document data across programs by designing an all-encompassing database schema that tracked aircraft models, options, effectivity, and document templates-allowing multiple departments to pull from the same structured dataset instead of maintaining their own disconnected spreadsheets.
• Automated validation of tens of thousands of wire connections in the HarnessSys to Siemens Capital Harness migration using advanced Excel formulas (a multi-line, heavily nested expression) that compared gauges, terminations, and connectivity and surfaced only real mismatches for engineers to review.
• Built Capital Harness BOM and validation reports that cross-checked harness connectivity against legacy data with special focus on COAX, jumpers, splices, and shorts-areas that previously required manual inspection.

Tech & Tools

Challenges

One major challenge was migrating long-lived harness data into a new CAD environment without introducing errors. Legacy HarnessSys drawings and wire lists didn't always follow consistent naming or formatting, while Siemens Capital Harness imposed a more structured model. To bridge that gap, I built Excel-based comparison logic that joined exports from both systems and used a page-long, nested formula to compare wire numbers, gauges, terminations, and endpoints. The goal was to highlight the handful of true discrepancies instead of overwhelming engineers with noise.

Another challenge was taking what had grown into a fragile, single-user Excel macro workflow for delivery documents and turning it into something scalable. Different departments had slightly different interpretations of what a “delivery packet” needed, and the existing workbook had evolved organically with duplicated logic and ambiguous columns. I spent time with stakeholders mapping how the data was actually used, then normalized it into aircraft, configuration, document, and effectivity tables that could support multiple programs.

Finally, I had to earn trust as an engineer building software-style solutions inside an avionics organization. That meant showing intermediate mockups, demoing small increments, and tying every new feature back to concrete pain points: fewer manual edits, fewer broken macros, and less time spent hunting for the right data when supporting a jet on the line.

Outcomes & Impact

• Replaced a fragile macro-based workflow with a maintainable internal web app so multiple teams could reliably generate and manage delivery documents without worrying about corrupting a master spreadsheet.
• Improved data integrity during harness migration by automatically validating large numbers of wire connections and surfacing only real mismatches for engineers to review, reducing manual checking effort.
• Created a reusable data model for delivery packets that can scale across future aircraft programs and customer-specific configurations instead of re-inventing the process each time.
• Enabled better collaboration between avionics, production, and customer service by providing tools and documentation that matched their terminology and plugged into how they already worked.

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