01
A&P Mechanics
Heavy check and scheduled maintenance, across certificate levels from recently certificated to senior technicians with production judgment.
An MRO does not hire one technician. It staffs a floor, against a schedule, with work already sold. That is a different problem to a single open seat.
When you need eight technicians for a check that starts in six weeks, the failure modes are different. Screening quality drops under time pressure, so the wrong-fit rate climbs exactly when you can least absorb it. Interview capacity becomes the bottleneck rather than candidate supply. And a hire that fails at month two costs more than the seat that was never filled, because the work was already committed.
Labour is the constraint, not the hangar. An aircraft does not move faster because bay space is available. Every week a seat stays open is throughput you have already sold and cannot deliver.
Heavy check and scheduled maintenance, across certificate levels from recently certificated to senior technicians with production judgment.
Install, troubleshooting and bench. The specialty most likely to hold up a check and the hardest to source.
Sheet metal and composite repair, screened on the actual repair types, tooling and documentation standard you work to.
Accessory, instrument and component work inside the shop, screened on test equipment and component family.
Supervised support that adds floor capacity now and develops into certificated capability later.
Inspection and documentation roles. Frequently the hardest seat to fill and the one that stops shipping when empty.
In a large operation attrition gets absorbed into headcount reporting and stops being visible as individual failures. It still costs. Recruiting spend, onboarding time, supervisory attention, the disruption to a crew, and then the same seat open again.
Two patterns show up repeatedly in large maintenance organisations. People hired into a defined lane who wanted breadth and leave for a smaller shop. And people who never received real onboarding because the floor was too busy, which is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
We run structured check-ins with both sides at 30, 60 and 90 days and feed what we learn back into the next search. See aviation technician retention.
Roles, certificate levels, platform, shift pattern and the date work starts. That is where an MRO search begins.
Compensation movement, hiring demand and pipeline data for aviation maintenance, drawn from public workforce sources and our own anonymized intake. One email per month.