Ep 164 | Aircraft Maintenance: Shortening the learning curve

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Turbine engines, it's like a big explosion in their brain when you start talking about some of the terms. Some of the verbiage you use, the different ta terms you have, things that go on that are different that you just can't. It's hard to visualize unless you can actually put your hands on it.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support every student's success. They say seeing is believing, but for many visual learners, seeing is understanding. But when it comes to learning aviation maintenance, how do you get your eyes on a giant engine? My next guest is the Aviation Maintenance Technology Coordinator at Georgetown Technical College. Today he's going to share how a special collaboration with King Arrow has delivered a literal turbine engine into the classroom for hands-on learning and streamed line instruction, facilitating tactical learning and practical outcomes. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Thank you. Good morning.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

This is so interesting because I never really thought about the process of learning, you know, airplane mechanics and the need to have a turbine engine in the classroom. But when I saw the picture of it, I thought, oh yeah, that would really, you know, make the light bulb go off if I could see it versus if I was just reading about it. So how did this collaboration even come about?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Well, the collaboration's been going on since about the second year that we started developing the program. One of the gentlemen that was one of the managers at King Air, which was actually Chaos Aero Marine at the time, contacted me because they had a young man working there that was interested in getting his A and P license. So he'd heard that we had we were building an A and P program. What did it take to get in? All these things. So we started the program and he did in fact come to the class. During that time, when he was in the class, another one of my students started working for him. And it was kind of a working, I guess it's a working collaboration with King Arrow at the time to help them out get some people there that were licensed to help them build their inspection processes and things. They build and sell parts from different types of C-130, P3 Orion, E2C Hawkey's aircraft that they all use the same engine. And so they're a parts procurement agency as well as they build engines and stuff. So our collaboration began then. And as time went on, they ended up not just the young men that was working there to come to the school, they ended up hiring five. And they there's two still there. So it's been an ongoing relationship with them. And it's very good to have our own students working there because they kind of understood the school, what we taught, what we needed to help teach his classes better.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

That's true, because they would literally know because they're the ones hiring the people. So I mean, that seems like the most natural thing in the world to go, okay, we see that we have a need that can be filled through staffing, and we can fill the need that you have to teach the staff that we will hire.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Correct. And that was what was really unique about it on going into this engine that we had built by them. I've been looking to try to get a turbine engine, a cutaway turbine engine. And cut by cutaway, I mean it's opened up to where you can see all the inner workings of the engine. You can see a lot of the moving parts inside the engine. You can track airflows and forces that are generated with inside the engine. And so by being able to see this, it it helps from a visual perspective quite a bit.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

So it's like cut in half.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

It's not really cut in half. There's pieces of the engine case in the cases of a turbine engine. There's pieces of the case that are cut out, and that way you can see the compressor section, the combustion section, the turbine section, all the pieces in between all those as well, and kind of understand how different cycles of the engine occur within those cases. And I'd been trying to buy one of these things for gosh, four or five years. We'd try been trying to get one. Very cost prohibitive. There was only at the time two manufacturers in the entire world that we could find that would build these things. And they were anywhere from $75,000 to $100,000 for one of these things. Wow. So just kind of offhand one day in a conversation with one of my former students that's working there. He's their director of maintenance now, which was a really neat move too. I said, Would you guys by chance be interested in building one of these things for me? And we talked about it, what we needed and all this. And Sean, he told me, he said, you know, that would be that would have been really neat when I was in school to be able to see this. Because turbine engines, it's like a big explosion in their brain when you start talking about some of the terms, some of the verbiage you use, the different ta terms you have, things that go on that are different that you just can't. It's hard to visualize unless you can actually put your hands on it.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Yeah, what is the learning curve without an actual engine in the classroom, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 4:57

The learning curve is a lot steeper because it takes longer to see the light bulbs come on, if you will, with the engine on the stand cut away, where you can explain each section of this turbine engine. I can show them compressor. I can say, okay, this is a 14-stage compressor. If I tell you what a 14-stage compressor is, what do you think it is?

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Um I got nothing. I got nothing.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Okay. And you're no better with turbine engines than 99.999% of my students that come through there know exactly what you do about a turbine engine coming into this whole thing. So by having this engine apart, this not really apart, open, uh open together. Yeah. Yeah. It you can explain, okay, the 14 stages of this compressor means I have a stator and a rotor and a stator and a rotor. And I can explain to them that a stator is exactly what it says it is, it stays. A rotor rotates, and this is what causes compression to happen and the air to move on down further in the engine itself. With me standing up in a classroom, standing in front of you, you just you'd just be staring at me, drool coming out of your mouth, and you'd have a very confused look on your face. And so by having this in place now, as I'm talking to the class, or as my turbine instructor is talking to the class, he can explain to this. And by putting their hands on it and being able to physically see how this occurs, the light bulbs come on much quicker. Something that would have taken several weeks sometimes for everybody in the class to get a general idea of what's going on. Now you can do it in days. So it expedites the process a lot.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

I was surprised that you said your students arrive at the class not knowing anything more in theory than I do about the engines. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

It's true though. I have people that have been painting water towers their whole life. Nothing against water tower painters. We've got to have them. But you know, this guy's been seeing planes fly over his head every day for the last 15 years. He's been painting water towers and said, you know, I'd like to know how to work on one of those things. What it would be like. So this guy's got he's got the mechanical sense of a kitty cat. And he comes into the class, and when he walks out of the class, he knows which end of a screwdriver to hold in his hand and how to work on these things. And he gets a license, and now he's on to the next stage of his life. And it literally changes lives. Students come back and they'll tell you that this was probably the biggest single life-changing event they've ever had to go to this school and learn this stuff and be able to go out and and make something of themselves that they can be proud of. So it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Can you expand on that a little bit? How this would be life-changing? Because I, in my imagination, I'm seeing the guy on the water tower, actually, now that you've said that I can't remove him from my mind.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

I've focused you now.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

I mean you have focused me. I'm calibrated. So I think, okay, this person has something that gives them the just maybe idea. Like just maybe, I would be a part of this. Because I think the natural tendency for a lot of folks is to self-exclude versus self-include, unless you are a glass half-full kind of person. So I'm imagining that. And then you say this changes their life. So help me fill in the middle there. What's happening?

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Well, you have people from all different walks of life. And some we've had guys come through that have never even put air in their own tires before. The one student that we had come through, he'd I told him to go down one day. This is very eye-opening for me. I asked him to go down and put air in the tires on one of the aircraft we had on the floor out there in the hangar. And he looked at me and said, Mr. Davis, how do I how do you do that? I've never done that before. I said, You you get the air hose, you put air in the tire. It's that simple. He goes, I I've never done that. And I had this confused look on my face. You want to be an airplane mechanic. Have you never done it? I said, You've never put air in your bicycle tires? No, my dad always did that for me. And he to me, I I had to look at it, I had to sit back for a second, I had to kind of reflect a little bit and think, wow, this is a huge blank page that I can fill out here. And so you take a guy like that's never ever held a wrench in his hand, and he turns into one of the best mechanics in the area, and you really feel like you've done something, and that's so it's validating. But we have people like that. We also have mechanics, we have mechanics that come through as well. I find that people that have a lot of mechanical experience are actually harder to teach because they have to unlearn their bad habits. I would be a horrible student. I would be, I would be the worst student in the world because there's not a lot in this world that I haven't worked on between boats and cars and airplanes and water towers.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

There's not a lot I haven't done. And so and it sounds cocky, but I know a lot of things. But for me to learn how somebody else wants me to do it is very it's a struggling thing for me. I would be horrible.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

So what are the common qualities that make a student successful in this program? Because if it's not pre-existing mechanical experience, which I'm sure I can't be the only person that thought that was certainly the key. What is the key?

SPEAKER_01 9:49

A lot of it comes from being in the class. Every one of our classes starts out at 25 people. That's the limit by the FAA regulations. We can't have more than 25 students per instructor. So you have 25 people that come into this class, our class starting this next August. There'll be 25 people, and there will be 25 people that probably have never met each other ever. They know nothing about each other. Four weeks into it, five weeks into it, now they're starting to break off into little groups and they're starting to know each other and starting to go to lunch together. And from there they develop friendships and they develop a camaraderie and a drive. And sometimes they develop a competition on who's going to be the best guy in the class, who's going to get the best grades in the class. And my second class had a gentleman that came in, he was out of the army, and he'd had some bad things happen to him in the army, had a rough, real rough time. And in the first four months he was there, I really, really thought he was not going to make it to the class. Really did not think he'd be able to do this because he just didn't have what I thought was the drive to do it. And we went on summer break. We went out in May and he came back in August and he was like a different person. I mean, just the look at his eyes was even different. And I pulled him aside. I said, What's going on? You know, it's tell me what happened to you. I said, This is a guy that I haven't seen before. He said, Mr. Davis, he says, I worked at a restaurant down on Perido Key all last summer. He said, and it was the most miserable summer of my entire existence. He said, I swore to myself, I swore on a stack of Bibles, I would never ever do that again. This is what I want to do. And from there on out, he was one of the top three guys in the class consistently from a project standpoint to a GPA standpoint. Everything he did was 110% from there on out. And it just took that little light in his fire to get him going over that summer. And it's nothing against doing the stuff at the restaurant. But that was not what he were that's not where he felt like he needed to be. And we changed it for him.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

So he had clarity and a little bit of determination.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Oh yeah. Now he's married, got a kid, and just doing great. And it's really from our standpoint as instructors, knowing that we can have successes like that, to guys that gosh, what would have happened to him had he not stumbled into our program, had his GI Bill not helped him with the program and kind of allowed him to have the latitude to do these things, what would have happened? Who knows? It's hypothetical. He might have gone to great things, but he might have he might end up in a ditch somewhere too. Yeah. You just don't know. And so we changed lives by doing this. And we really get a lot of satisfaction from an instructor's standpoint. Our satisfaction is derived from our student successes. We really enjoy watching our students do well. Well, we keep track of them. We keep track of all these guys. We know where they're going, who they're working for, how much money they're making.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

How many of the students end up getting employed at King Arrow?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Right now he has two of our former students there. He is looking, I just talked to him just a couple of weeks ago, and he's looking probably to hire two or three more. Chris Walls, the owner of King Arrow, he has a very small organization. They have a big square footage, huge square footage in their warehouse, but what they do is very specialized. And they're about to open up what's called a 145 repair station with the FAA, which means they can now certify parts for serviceability for aircraft and put an FAA tag on it, which an FAA tag for serviceability makes a $10,000 part, a $100,000 part. So he's moving into another world. They'll be doing non-destructive testing, X-ray, Magnaflux, all these different types of tests they can do, eddy current checks, and they're going to need more people qualified to do that. And so that's what they're going to be looking for. How soon he needs them, I don't know. That's something we're still discussing. But the PSA Airlines here in town is still looking at their recruiter is coming down next week, I believe it is.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

To Georgetown.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

To Georgetown, yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

So I mean that's really like a very clear on-ramp to employment. It's not like, hey, we'll take your money as a technical college, give you a pat on the back, and then good luck out there in the world. Like there's really more of a bridge. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

We actually have some really good industry contacts between uh ST engineering here in town. They would like to hire more people than we can put out. There's a there's another MRO facility over in Lake City that has expressed interest in our students. I mean, coming all the way over from Lake City to try to hire students. It's pretty extreme, too. Civil Service has hired a lot of our guys. They're kind of on hold right now. They're going through a change as far as the aircraft that they're working on over on NAS. But also, we have Momentum and V2X out at Whiting Field that does all the helicopter work. They're doing a transition now from the TH-57 helicopters to the new TH-73. Leonardo Helicopters is who developed that helicopter for the Navy. And they also have a facility out in Milton now on Peter Prince Airport.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

So your students could become civilian contractors.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Absolutely. A lot of them do. As a matter of fact, if you want to make the large money in Pensacola as far as an aircraft maintainer goes, that's where you're going to make it, is probably doing VTOX or momentum. With VTX, I should say. Most of the guys as a plane captain there will start in the $40 an hour range, which is tremendous. You know, you got a guy that's making $15 an hour flipping burgers, and nothing is wrong with a burger flipper. We've got to have them. But the same guy can go to two years of tech school, probably get it paid for through Pell Grants or last dollar grants or whatever. There's so much money out there to go to school free.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Well, plus you just need to pay rent. I mean, the average rent in Pittscool is like $1,400, $1,500. So you can't really do that with $15 an hour.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

It's cheaper to buy a house now than it is to rent anywhere. That's a crazy thing, too. That's just kind of ludicrous. But uh the starting pay for even an aircraft washer, I think, out at Whiting Field is around $20, $25 an hour. I'm going to sling soap at an airplane and grease some struts. I can do that for $25 an hour. Yeah. Sign me up. Yeah. No responsibility in it. You just go out and get wet, and of course, in the wintertime, it's probably not much fun. But yeah, that's the way it is, though. And the uh when we started this whole program, at the time we started it, a large majority of the aircraft maintainers in the world, especially U.S. as far as APs go, were above 55 years old. And so you have over half the maintainers that are looking at that retirement thing. And here comes COVID. Delta, American, United, all these large companies, in lieu of firing or furloughing these employees, they offered them early employment. And so here you have 70% of your 50% now is taken in early retirement because they're just not needed because nobody's flying. So the industry took a big hiccup during COVID and now it's still in a rebuild phase, but they're still very short on mechanics. You'll hear naysayers say, oh no, they're not hiring right now. Yeah, they are. They're hiring qualified people every day. You just got to get the qualifications.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

So what are the qualifications that you would get as a student graduating from this program? What certifications would you have that maybe you wouldn't get otherwise?

SPEAKER_01 16:53

It's an A and P license. It's an airframe and power plant license. The FAA licenses you to work on aircraft. And what it starts out as is a license to learn. And that's what we teach is we take them through all the steps to get their FAA license, the A and P license. And from there, it's a matter of what do you want to do? Honestly, there's companies standing there waiting to hire you when you have your A and P license. A company like ST Engineering, they don't require an A and P license to work because as an MRO, a maintenance rebuild overhaul facility, they they have an umbrella, so to speak, as a manufacturer or a rebuild overhaul facility. And so they have a certificate that where you could go in and work on an aircraft if you really had the desire. You could go in there and you could sign things off. And they would have a guy over you sign it off, and that would what would make it legal to fly again. But with an AP license, I can go anywhere and do that, not just under this particular umbrella of the company I work for. And so the options are higher, the pay is higher. He could hire you in at $18 an hour as just a mechanic, I think. But with an A and P license, you'll make 20 or 22, and that much difference.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

I mean, that's really getting ahead when you think about like year over year, what opportunities might be there for you.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Absolutely, and your opportunities to move within a company or move out of that company if you so desire. He had a deal going with, I want to say it was American Airline, maybe he's United, and UPS also, where you work for them for a couple of years, you get your tasks signed off for working on what they call heavy aircraft, your 737s, 777s, larger aircraft, larger airbuses and stuff. You get all your sign-offs done for that, and you have an opportunity to move over to UPS on their line up in Memphis, Tennessee, or wherever it is they want to put you at. And now you've gone from making $20 an hour here to making $40 an hour there. But you have to be obviously you have to be flexible enough to be able to move. So so that's it's opportunities. The AMP license will open doors for you that a non-licensed person would not have the opportunity even knock.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

I can see where this really is the difference maker and why you have a very special standing bet with your classes.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

You remembered that, did you? Yeah, I had a I've got a kind of a standing bet with them. If everybody in the entire class has an airframe license, if they've already taken all their tests and gotten the AP light or the airframe license before they graduate power plant, I buy them chicken biscuits. And to date, I've had one class did that. And ironically, the new instructor we just hired was in that class. Yeah, I have one of our former students now, he's one of my instructors as well. I love that. Yeah, he had airplane experience before he came into it. He's got a vast mechanical background. And went out in the industry for a few more years and found out we had an opportunity here for uh for an instructor job. We had an instructor that retired at Christmas and he expressed interest in it. We ended up hiring him, which I thought is really unique having one of my former students, and I taught the guy now is teaching, he's teaching airframe right now. He'll be teaching my first generals class that he'll have as his own class starting in August.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Well, and you've retired twice.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Yes, ma'am.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

And yet we're here today talking.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

I'm not real smart.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

So, well, no, I don't think I was just gonna ask, why does this matter to you?

SPEAKER_01 20:11

To me, we're giving people opportunities. We're giving them opportunities in life to do something different. We're giving them pathways, we're opening doors and changing people's lives by giving the opportunity to go out and do this stuff. Once again, do you wanna do you wanna be Titan bicycle spokes for $15 an hour? Do you want to work on an airplane? Do you want to do you want to watch the product of what you have just done take off in the sky and transport people around the world? I have a passion for doing stuff like that with my military background. I worked with the hurricane hunters for 35 years, and so that was a big thing for me. We would work all night just to make that one plane fly. And we didn't care. That was what we did. That's how we operated. And it was the best job that I ever left. I went into the Air Force for four years and came out 35 years later. So sounds kind of weird, doesn't it? But uh yeah, we like what we do, and all of my instructors, all the guys I work with, work for. I'm the program coordinator, and people say, Oh, you got these guys working. No, I don't, they don't work for me. I work for them. I'm the one that's responsible for making sure they have what they need to instruct well. I'm the one that's responsible for making sure they have everything they need to make a day go as seamless as possible so the students have the best outcome every day that they're there. That's in a nutshell what we try to do. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

I think that sums it up pretty well. If people want to learn more about this program for themselves, where should they look?

SPEAKER_01 21:32

The George Stone website. If they'll contact George Stone, they can talk to one of our counselors, get on the waiting list. We do have a waiting list. It's anywhere 50 to 70 people generally on our waiting list, but not to be discouraged by a 50 or 70 person waiting list. I've had people contact me in May to get on the waiting list and start in the following August because what they'll what will happen is they'll call 25 people. Out of the 25, maybe 10 respond in the time that they give them, 48 hours, whatever. So then they have 15 slots that they had to fill there. So they'll go to the next 15 people on the list. If five of that 15, well, they still got 10 to fill. So there's a chance that it you know skips on down the road. They'll kick the rock down the road until they can fill that class of 25 people. Right now, my we're about to graduate our biggest class ever. It's 20, it started out as 25. We've got 22 people in there right now. 21 already have their licenses. So I'm one away from having to buy chicken biscuits.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

We'll have to follow a follow-up to give us the chicken biscuit update. But thank you, Bill, so much for sharing your enthusiasm and about the program. This was fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. We enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of the Scambia County Public Schools.