NDT Simulator & Practical NDT Training in Quebec

Atlantis built the first-ever online practical NDT simulation portal for practice and hands-on experience, and Quebec is one of the places where precise, repeatable inspection skill matters most in North America. Practical NDT is an immersive, 3D, game-like platform that runs in a browser or app. Technicians handle virtual eddy current coils, UT and phased array probes, magnetic particle yokes, penetrant kits, radiographic setups and PMI analysers on realistic assets: airframe panels and components, weld coupons, process piping, heat-exchanger tubes, pressure vessels and a full-size storage tank. Every job is scored, so you know what you found, what you missed and why. Quebec's inspection work is unusually varied. Greater Montreal is one of the world's main aerospace clusters. The province has two crude oil refineries, at Montréal-Est and Lévis, plus shipbuilding and a major port on the St. Lawrence. Saguenay and the North Shore have aluminium smelters, iron ore operations and large hydroelectric infrastructure. This hub maps Practical NDT to that work, region by region, and links to the page for each Quebec city.

Quebec's NDT workforce and where the work is

Greater Montreal is aerospace first. The metro area hosts business jet and commercial aircraft assembly, including final assembly of a commercial airliner family and helicopter production at Mirabel. It also has aero-engine design and manufacturing on the South Shore, flight simulator and training industries, landing gear and component makers, and a deep supply chain of machining, composites and special-process shops. Maintenance, repair and overhaul work at Montréal-Trudeau and Mirabel adds in-service inspection. Aerospace NDT means eddy current, ultrasonic, penetrant and magnetic particle inspection done to strict specifications and qualification rules, often in a production environment where consistency matters as much as sensitivity. Montreal also has an east-end refinery and petrochemical complex in Montréal-Est, the Port of Montreal's container and liquid-bulk terminals, rail equipment and heavy manufacturing, and a large construction sector with steel bridges and structures that need weld inspection.

Quebec City and Chaudière-Appalaches have the province's largest refinery, at Lévis on the south shore, together with its marine terminal and tank farms. The Lévis shipyard is Canada's largest by capacity and became the third strategic partner in the National Shipbuilding Strategy in 2023, bringing large naval and Coast Guard programmes to the region. The Port of Québec handles bulk and liquid cargo. Refinery turnarounds, shipyard weld inspection and terminal tank work are the core of NDT demand here.

Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean is one of the world's major aluminium production regions. Several smelters around Jonquière, La Baie and Alma run anode plants, potlines, casthouses and the heavy structural, crane and rotating equipment that goes with them. Pulp and paper mills, private and public hydroelectric stations, the deepwater Port of Saguenay and an air force fighter base at Bagotville round out the region.

The North Shore, Mauricie and the North add more heavy work. Aluminium smelters operate at Baie-Comeau and Sept-Îles, and iron ore mines in the Labrador Trough ship through pellet plants and ports at Sept-Îles and Port-Cartier. Hydro-Québec's large dams and generating stations on the Manicouagan and La Grande rivers depend on penstocks, gates, turbines and generators that need periodic inspection. Bécancour's industrial park on the St. Lawrence is growing around chemicals and battery materials.

Across these regions, the work demands both discipline and range. An aerospace ET technician must be consistent across thousands of repeat inspections. A refinery or smelter technician may face a shutdown where rare defects appear once a year. Physical specimens with the right flaws are expensive, and production equipment cannot be taken offline for practice. Practical NDT gives Quebec technicians a way to practise between those moments.

Practical NDT by city in Quebec

Each Quebec city below has its own Practical NDT page with deeper local detail. The table summarises where the work is and which environments and methods fit best.

Montreal. Montreal's NDT workforce is weighted toward aerospace, where production and MRO inspection rely on eddy current, penetrant, ultrasonic and magnetic particle techniques applied to tight specifications. The Aircraft Hangar and NDT Lab are the natural starting point for these technicians: fastener-hole ET, surface-crack PT on machined parts and UT on bonded and composite structure. Montreal also has the east-end refinery and petrochemical plants, port terminals and heavy fabrication, so plant-side technicians can work through the Oil & Gas Site and Welding Workshop as well.

Quebec City. The Quebec City region combines the province's biggest refinery with Canada's largest shipyard by capacity, both at Lévis across the river. Refinery turnarounds bring IRIS tube testing, PMI, corrosion mapping and tank inspection. Shipbuilding under federal programmes brings a large volume of hull and outfitting weld inspection with UT, PAUT and RT. The Welding Workshop, Oil & Gas Site and Storage Tank environments cover nearly all of it, and technicians often move between the yard and the refinery depending on the season.

Saguenay. Saguenay's aluminium smelters are heavy, harsh industrial sites: overhead cranes, potline structures, casthouse equipment, anode plant machinery and large rotating equipment that needs MT and UT weld inspection, thickness surveys and component checks. Pulp and paper mills add boiler and recovery-boiler tube inspection. Hydroelectric stations need inspection of penstocks, turbines and gates. The Welding Workshop and NDT Lab match most of this work, and the Oil & Gas Site's IRIS and PMI jobs transfer well to mill boiler and tube work.

Environments and methods that match Quebec work

Practical NDT includes five workplace environments and twelve methods: PT, MT and VT for surface work; UT contact, PAUT, TOFD and RT for volumetric work; ET and MFL for electromagnetic work; and LRUT guided-wave screening, IRIS internal rotary UT and PMI alloy verification as specialist techniques. There are 33 guided lessons, plus job libraries of 52 jobs in the NDT Lab, 52 in the Welding Workshop, 54 in the Aircraft Hangar and 73 at the Oil & Gas Site.

Aircraft Hangar: Montreal aerospace. Quebec's aerospace cluster makes the Aircraft Hangar especially relevant. It covers eddy current for surface and near-surface cracks around fasteners and in bolt holes, ultrasonic inspection of airframe and bonded structure, and visual inspection of components. Aerospace technicians who spend most of their time on one part family can use the hangar jobs to keep the rest of their method knowledge current.

NDT Lab: machining, castings and calibration. Montreal's machining and component shops, and the casting and forging suppliers across the province, depend on PT, MT, ET and UT on bench-sized parts. The NDT Lab's specimens and reference blocks let technicians rehearse penetrant process control, MT field direction, ET setup and UT calibration until those habits are automatic.

Welding Workshop: shipbuilding, bridges, smelters and fabrication. The Lévis shipyard, Montreal's structural steel and bridge work, and smelter and mill maintenance in Saguenay and the North Shore all come down to weld inspection. The Welding Workshop covers VT, MT, contact UT, PAUT, TOFD and RT on weld coupons and fabrication joints, with realistic lack of fusion, incomplete penetration, porosity, slag and cracking.

Oil & Gas Site: refineries and process plants. The refineries at Montréal-Est and Lévis, petrochemical plants in Montreal's east end and chemical plants at Bécancour fit the Oil & Gas Site. It covers piping weld and corrosion inspection, IRIS on heat-exchanger tubes, PMI to catch wrong-alloy components and LRUT screening of long pipe runs. The IRIS jobs also transfer to boiler tube work at pulp mills.

Storage Tank. Refinery tank farms and marine terminals at Lévis and Montréal-Est, port fuel storage, and industrial and airport tank farms need UT shell thickness surveys and MFL floor screening. The full-size tank environment lets inspectors rehearse grid layout, readings and floor-scan interpretation.

Regulators and requirements Quebec technicians meet

NDT personnel certification. Canada's national scheme for NDT personnel certification is CAN/CGSB-48.9712, the Canadian adoption of ISO 9712, with certification issued by the NDT Certification Body of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). The Canadian General Standards Board, which maintained the standard, ceased operations on 1 April 2026. NRCan has stated that the standard remains valid for its current cycle and that its certification services continue unchanged. Many Canadian owners, codes and contracts in Quebec specify NRCan certification. Aerospace manufacturers and MRO organisations commonly qualify NDT staff under aerospace personnel qualification standards, and some US-linked employers use ASNT SNT-TC-1A. That is market context. Atlantis's own training is built around SNT-TC-1A. Practical NDT is practice for the method skills every scheme examines. Practical NDT is not affiliated with NRCan and is not an NRCan examination or preparation course.

Radiation. Radiation is federally regulated in Canada by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), which licenses companies that possess and use radioactive sources for industrial radiography. Anyone operating a gamma radiography exposure device must be a CNSC-certified Exposure Device Operator (EDO) or work under the direct supervision of one. The EDO written examination is administered by NRCan's NDT Certification Body, and certification is renewed every five years. Workplace health and safety, including radiation protection at work, is also overseen provincially by the CNESST.

Pressure equipment, pipelines and aviation. Boilers, pressure vessels and pressure piping in Quebec are regulated by the Régie du bâtiment du Québec (RBQ). The RBQ adopts the codes that set requirements for the design, construction, installation, inspection, testing and repair of pressure equipment, including CSA B51. Operator-users must have their pressure installations periodically inspected by a personne reconnue, an organisation recognised by the RBQ. Interprovincial pipelines serving Quebec fall under the federal Canada Energy Regulator and CSA Z662. Structural welding fabricators are commonly certified to CSA W47.1, and aviation maintenance follows Transport Canada rules. Under the Charter of the French Language, procedures, forms and workplace documentation in Quebec are commonly in French, and many inspection reports are bilingual. Technicians need to be comfortable reading method terminology in French.

For trainees, working technicians and Level IIIs in Quebec

New trainees. Quebec's vocational schools, CEGEPs and aerospace training centres produce machinists, welders, aircraft maintenance technicians and technologists, many of whom move into NDT. Practical NDT's 33 guided lessons give them structured fundamentals: how penetrant dwell and development work, why MT field direction matters, what a clean UT calibration looks like and how common defects appear in each method. Scored jobs let supervisors see objectively who is ready to move toward formal training and examinations, whichever scheme the employer uses.

Working technicians. An aerospace ET technician on one production line, a smelter maintenance technician who mostly does MT, or a refinery technician who only sees IRIS during a turnaround will all lose sharpness on the methods they rarely use. Practical NDT's rare-defect refreshers let them rehearse those jobs before they are needed, in short sessions between shifts or rotations.

Level IIIs and team leads. Level 3s in Quebec write procedures, supervise examinations and assign crews across aerospace, process and heavy industry. Practical NDT lets them build scenario sets matched to an upcoming shutdown, production programme or ship block, assign them to a crew, benchmark everyone on the same defects and identify coverage gaps before work starts. Teams spread between Montreal, Quebec City and Saguenay can all work from the same scenario sets.

Practice vs certification

Practical NDT is a practice and readiness tool. It is not a certification under CAN/CGSB-48.9712, aerospace qualification standards, ASNT SNT-TC-1A or any other scheme. It does not replace the practical examination on real specimens that each scheme requires. It also does not replace the documented industrial experience certification demands, or CNSC EDO certification for gamma radiography. What it offers is many more realistic repetitions than a physical specimen library can, with instant feedback on every call, so the real exam and the real job feel familiar. For formal courses, see Atlantis NDT training. Practical NDT is designed to work alongside it.

Bring Practical NDT to your Quebec team

Atlantis built the first-ever online practical NDT simulation portal for practice and hands-on experience. The scenario library was designed by Anoop Rayavarapu, ASNT NDT Level III and founder of Atlantis NDT, who also leads Atlantis training. Whether you run an aerospace NDT department in Greater Montreal, an inspection company serving the Lévis refinery and shipyard, or a maintenance team at a Saguenay smelter or mill, a live demo is the fastest way to see whether it fits.

On the demo we will show the environments that match your work, walk through assigning and scoring scenario sets, and talk through how Practical NDT fits your training plan and certification scheme. If your crew needs French-language material, raise it on the call. We would rather discuss what is available honestly than promise it on this page. Pricing is quote-on-request. Practical NDT is affordable, accessible and fully customisable. Request a Practical NDT demo for your Quebec team, or read the Practical NDT overview first. Individual technicians can ask about individual access too.

Frequently asked questions

Does Practical NDT count toward NRCan certification in Quebec?

No. Certification under CAN/CGSB-48.9712 is issued by NRCan's NDT Certification Body and requires its own training, industrial experience and examinations, including a practical exam on real specimens. Practical NDT does not count toward any of those. It helps you build and keep the method skills those exams test.

Is Practical NDT useful for aerospace NDT technicians in Montreal?

Yes. The Aircraft Hangar and NDT Lab cover eddy current, ultrasonic, penetrant and visual inspection of airframe structure and components. Aerospace employers still qualify their staff under their own written practices and applicable standards. Practical NDT supports the skill-building behind that, not the qualification itself.

Is the platform available in French?

We do not claim French-language delivery on this page. Workplace documentation in Quebec is commonly in French, so if your team needs French material, raise it on your demo call and we will tell you honestly what is available.

Can I practise radiography without being an EDO?

Yes. RT in Practical NDT is simulated, with no source or X-ray tube, so anyone can practise setup and image interpretation. Operating a real gamma exposure device in Canada still requires CNSC EDO certification or direct supervision by a certified EDO.

Which environments suit smelter and mill maintenance crews in Saguenay?

The Welding Workshop for MT, UT and VT on structural and crane welds; the NDT Lab for calibration and component checks; and the Oil & Gas Site's IRIS and PMI jobs, which transfer well to boiler tube and alloy verification work at mills.

How do we get started across several Quebec sites?

Access runs in a browser or app, so crews in Montreal, Quebec City and Saguenay can work from the same assigned scenario sets. Request a demo and we will scope a rollout with you. Pricing is quote-on-request.

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