September 29, 2024: An adverse combination of events has led to a severe shortage of aircraft maintainers for the U.S. military and commercial aviation. It began with mass retirements of military maintainers because so many had entered service between 2002 and 2008 due to increased military air operations to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most military retainers are in for only one or two enlistments. Each enlistment can last four or six years. Senior maintainers tend to stay in twenty years to obtain retirement benefits.

The current surge in retirements of experienced maintainers and a dearth of new air force recruits has left military aviation units with a growing shortage of both veteran and recently trained maintainers. The shortage meant lots of overtime for these maintainers. There is no time and a half pay for military personnel. That means no financial incentive to put up with extended periods of overtime. That led to more maintainers not re-enlisting or, if they were career maintainers, they retired early and went to work for commercial aviation. As civilian maintainers the working conditions are better, the pay higher, and you can stay in one place as long as you like. You also get 50 percent more per hour when you work over 40 hours a week.

Commercial aviation is also facing maintainer shortages because of more retirements and their own inability to hire enough new maintainers. Particularly painful is the shortage of senior maintainers, to train the new people as well as supervise and check the work before the aircraft can be returned to service. For the military this means fewer aircraft available for missions. Commercial airliners fly more hours per month than military aircraft and are built to handle that high tempo of operations. The maintainer shortage means more commercial flights are canceled or delayed. It may take up to a decade for military and commercial aviation to recruit and train their way out of the current shortages.

Normally, maintainers get little media coverage. During wartime you may hear of pilots, but not maintainers. Wars cannot be fought without military aircraft maintenance crews. During combat operations, the maintainers work 12 hour shifts and can turn a returning aircraft around in 15 minutes, complete with a new pilot, fuel and weapons, plus a quick check for equipment problems. An F-16 squadron of twelve is kept operational by a unit of 120 enlisted maintainers, including 37 sergeant Crew Chiefs who supervise, and do a lot of, the work.

The most capable of these maintenance personnel are from the Air National Guard. Unlike active duty maintainers, the National Guard airmen have three to four times the years of working on aircraft and have often worked on the same aircraft model for 5-10 years. This gives the Guardsmen an edge, as they know the quirks and weak spots of individual aircraft. Hours of work go into checking out an aircraft that is finished with a day’s operations.

Dozens of maintenance panels have to be opened so that items and lubricants can be checked for problems. Every 300 hours a more thorough check is made, and during combat operations, this usually means removing the engine to check even more components. Even seconds before an aircraft takes off, maintainers are rushing around the aircraft, running down checklists for access panels that must be closed and pins that must be removed. This final check includes visual inspection of bombs and missiles hanging off the aircraft and moveable parts that must be in the right position. There are times when the unit must surge by undertaking the maximum number of sorties, and this can mean round the clock operations. F-16s can operate day and night because of their night vision sensors. This means individual aircraft flying half a dozen or more sorties each day. The maintainers have to be particularly careful during a surge, because missing a problem can result in a lost aircraft, or at least an aborted one as the pilot discovers something isn't working once the aircraft is airborne. On these deployments, the maintainers sleep in tents near the air strip, meaning they have to sleep through takeoffs and the other noises of a wartime base. This includes alarms going off for various emergencies, and frequent small arms fire from a range that is always set up so the Air Force security troops can maintain their proficiency. If there's bad weather, you just work through it. So the sandstorms the infantry were slogging through on the way to Baghdad, also hit the air force maintainers down the line. Everyone ate sand. The maintainers also suffer casualties. Not a lot of fatalities, but lots of wounds as airmen get cut by the many sharp edges as they scramble around an aircraft on a dark airfield, checking it out one more time before take-off. You can usually tell how intense the flight operations have been by the number of blood trails on the flight line. Working in a combat zone encourages more maintainers to not reenlist or to retire.

The military has to address these problems because commercial airlines can quickly increase pay and improve working conditions as well as upgrading recruiting procedures. This causes military maintainers to leave as soon as they can and join the civilian maintainers.