Door Rigging Training Programs

When you get on an airplane, you might notice the door. It seems like a vertical hatch. You step through, and then if you’re close, you can see the flight attendant close the door, which looks both easy and complicated at the same time.

Whether passenger plug doors, large cargo doors, or the giant nose door of the 747 freighter, all doors on a large airplane are very highly engineered and operate to very specific tolerances. Setting them up correctly at the time of manufacturer is the door rigger’s job. Some doors like passenger doors take a single rigger a few days to complete. Some like the nose cargo door of a 747 can take a whole team to do over x amount of time. It’s a complicated, important job that few people know about.

My role as ID on these was to shadow a rigger or team for a specific door until I had the whole process down. For jobs like these, the best way I’ve found is to use video. That captures what the rigger is telling me as they do the work, and I can see what he’s talking about when I go back through the footage. I don’t need to ask for things twice – I capture it the first time and then only have to bother the SME with follow on questions or things we missed. Then I would either pull stills from the video or go back and shoot specific items or processes with a camera.

I packaged all the content into classroom instruction consisting of participant guides, instructor guides, photos, presentations, and videos to show at specific times in class. Courses were for each airplane, with groups of lessons for specific doors.