Machines and vehicles
What does an Aircraft Maintenance Technician do?
Finding out why something has stopped working, and putting it right.
What the day is like
- Indoors, under a roof.
- Tools, materials, your body.
- Largely on your own.
- Right or wrong, to a standard.
- Answerable for your own work.
The facts
- Pay
- $80,180 a year, median
- Aircraft and Avionics Equipment Mechanics and Technicians, May 2025
- Usually needs
- Postsecondary nondegree award
- Several years, and usually a formal qualification.
- Jobs
- +6% projected change in jobs, 2025-2035 projections
- Demand looks growing slowly
What is good about it
- You answer for your own work rather than for other people, which suits more people than admit it.
- You can see what you did at the end of the day.
What people find hard about it
- Paperwork for every action
- Night and shift work
- Zero tolerance for shortcuts
Licensing is long and strict, and rightly so: your signature says the aircraft is safe.
Will machines take this job?
Hard for machines to take over. Diagnostics increasingly come from software, but the repair itself and the judgement about what is safe do not.
How to find out whether it suits you
Tour a maintenance hangar and ask what the paperwork for one repair looks like.
Would this actually suit you?
CareerDNA works that out from what you choose rather than from what you say about yourself: two minutes of choosing between real jobs, a few puzzles, and some questions about what you are like. It is free, it saves as you go, and it will tell you plainly where the answer is thin.