A new way of exploring: Wichita engineer opens window to aviation through LEGOs, TikTok
While she walks through the factory floors of Textron Aviation, Kim Burton compares the assemblage of airplanes to that of a LEGO set. You build out the smaller pieces before constructing a large whole.
Burton is the director of sustaining engineering at Textron, where she’s worked for 20 years. When she’s not on the job, she takes this comparison quite literally.
She has taken to answering aviation-related questions using LEGO models on her personal TikTok account, @kimengineers. It has over 35,000 followers.
Her first use of LEGO models was in response to a thought experiment: If an airplane was rolling on a treadmill running fast enough in the opposite direction, could the plane take off?
“To me, it’s a force experiment,” she said. “The thrust of an engine … pushing an airplane forward cannot be counteracted by a backwards treadmill, because the only force the treadmill has is the wheels.”
In a follow-up video, Burton dropped a counterweight attached to a LEGO airplane while pulling a sheet of paper in the opposite direction, simulating the experiment to prove the plane will still take off.
“The comments, people were like, ‘This is such a great way to do it because this one had LEGO,’” she said. “It got more attention, so I was like, OK, that was fun.”
Opening the door to aviation, engineering
Burton started regularly discussing aviation-related topics using LEGO models, mixing these videos in with her regular posts about her life and Wichita. She tries to post about every other day.
Though she often takes requests and answers questions about aviation, Burton said she will steer videos toward topics she is familiar with but could learn more about. She hopes this will push others to learn more on their own in turn.
“There’s so much I still don’t know about airplanes. I do not claim to know everything. I am not a professional pilot,” she said. “I like talking about the stuff where I know a lot of little things, and I go out on the internet to find what’s publicly available.”
@kimengineers is unaffiliated with Textron. Burton said she wants to keep her personal account from being a work TikTok.
She started posting on @kimengineers over a year ago after following her 13-year-old daughter onto the app.
“I grew up with parents who were not real big on the internet, and some parents are like ‘You should ban the heck out of your kids being on the internet,’” she said. “I’m more of the mode of like I want to learn what they’re into and get into it myself and figure out what this community is all about.”
More than anything, Burton said she hopes her aviation videos can open the door to people exploring and learning more about aviation and engineering.
“I think it’s important for engineers and technical people to talk about what they do, and I think it’s a big struggle for us,” she said. “We work in closed-off, proprietorial worlds, and we’re so heads down.”
Recruiting challenges in STEM
Burton spoke about a recruiting challenge in STEM, as many children grow up without knowing exactly what professionals like engineers do. This is a problem, she said, that teachers and doctors don’t have.
“They think that engineers are this … like it’s a divine, priest-like calling. You have to be ‘the type.’ You have to have the knack. You have to have taken apart and put together an airplane in the kitchen by the time you were eight years old,” she said. “I wasn’t like that, and I had to grow the confidence to get into it, and so, if anything, that’s why I like to make technical videos, you know?”
Of Burton’s three posts that were pinned on her TikTok account, two of them used LEGO models to answer questions about aviation. In the third, Burton discussed her first day of college as a woman in electrical engineering.
The two LEGO videos had 247,000 and 405,000 views when checked recently. The TikTok about her first day of school had been viewed 529,000 times.
“Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder: Who are we leaving out?” she says in the last video. “Part of the reason I made it is because I had an engineer dad. I had a mom who told me that, if women don’t belong somewhere, you question the hell out of it and I am straight, white, from this country. There is so much other stuff I have that other people don’t.”
She said she hopes that discussing her field and covering technical topics approachably will let people know aviation and engineering don’t have to be inaccessible fields.
“They [kids] don’t have to wake up and be like ‘I’m going to be an airplane designer.’ In fact, you shouldn’t do that,” she said. “You should stay open-minded and pick a big, huge degree – electrical, mechanical, aerospace – and the world will take you from there. We will train you. You don’t have to have everything set in stone when you’re 18. We really intimidate kids about that.”
