With a degree in Aerospace Engineering and nearly 15 years’ experience in Leonardo, Giorgia Bellino serves as ATR Contract Manager and Head of the Business Unit “ATR programme Offers and Contract Management”. The ATR is a joint venture between Leonardo and Airbus and “the world's leading manufacturer of turboprop aircraft for regional transport, with a capacity of 50 to 70 seats”. As part of the Italian-French consortium’s business line, Leonardo is committed to producing the entire fuselage and the vertical and horizontal tail stabilisers, made of composite material, for all aircraft, including new versions of the ATR 42-600 STOL (Short Take-Off and Landing, for landing on runways of under 800 m) and Cargo.
It is with this European project that Giorgia shaped her professional career, at the Leonardo site of Pomigliano d'Arco, near Naples: “I have experienced the development of the ATR VIP version, the evolution into the -600 version […], and then the Cargo version of the ATR 72. Today, we are developing the STOL version of the ATR 42, for take-off and landing on particularly short runways.” The project undergoes continuous evolutions to promptly meet the needs of the market, and today features more than 1,800 aircraft destined for more than 200 airlines in 100 countries around the world.
Giorgia deals with the commercial side of managing the contract with ATR, therefore the part relating to new developments, and to this end she is well aware that her technical expertise has provided a solid basis on which to build the more sensitive phases of certain processes. Another activity to which Giorgia contributes is the NEMESIS project, launched in September 2020. Through the digitisation and complete automation of the ATR fuselage assembly line, this project plans to transform the current production site at Pomigliano and its supply chain into a Smart Factory: a centre of excellence for all aircraft structures, up to the narrow-body (or single-aisle) aircraft. This will be achieved through redesign, re-industrialisation, digitisation and automation.
According to Giorgia, “the biggest challenge” of working for an international, intercultural, multi-technological company was to “strike the right work-life balance, so as to give my best both on the job and in the family.” Her interest in Space, for example, is a passion that she is trying to convey to her daughters, partly through the many corporate initiatives aimed at employees and their families. This, too, is what it means to work in Leonardo: to “grow, certainly from a professional point of view, but also from a personal and human perspective,” while “innovating and helping to build our future.”