When the Air Force revealed a new force design for its aircraft maintenance career fields Jan. 27, it kicked off a wave of discussion on social media forums about what it might mean for one of the branch’s largest career fields. Air & Space Forces Magazine checked in with former and current maintainers for their thoughts on the sweeping change, which would start to take effect in 2027.
Proponents of the new design said it could provide junior enlisted Airmen more hands-on time to master the fundamentals of aircraft maintenance, and more experienced Airmen the chance to stay close to the flight line throughout their careers. It might also help prepare maintainers for working in smaller, isolated teams and on next-generation platforms.
On the other hand, critics fear the new design could dilute expertise across the career field and reduce local leaders’ ability to solve complex maintenance problems. Another concern is how the Air Force would switch to the new scheme amid a recent maintainer recruitment slump and resource scarcity.
The Force Design
The new plan would condense more than 50 aircraft maintenance job specialties down to just seven. Junior enlisted maintainers will start out in a generalist track, a single Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) where they will be trained on the most common maintenance tasks, such as launching, recovering, and fueling aircraft, across multiple airframes.
Under the current system, junior enlisted maintainers start their careers in a specific niche, such as avionics, hydraulics, or structures. But in the new force design, specialization would not occur until the rank of Senior Airman. Once there, Airmen will choose between six tracks: Avionics and Electrical, Aerospace Ground Equipment, Advanced Mechanical, Crew Support Systems, Fabrication, and Intermediate-level engines.
The specialties would not be tied to a specific airframe, which would allow for more assignments and development opportunities, maintenance career field managers at Headquarters Air Force said in a memo.
Once they reach the rank of technical sergeant, Airmen can apply to join the technical track, where they would pick up skills from all six specialties to become “THE nose to tail cross-functional expert” on a given airframe the rest of their careers, managers wrote.
Alternatively, technical sergeants can stay in a specialist track until they reach master sergeant, where they switch to the leadership track, providing institutional and functional oversight. Airmen can stay in the technical or leadership track, or they could switch between the two.
Contexts and Concerns
The memo laid out two reasons for the new force design: workload and the possibility of conflict against Russia or China. Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Flosi told reporters in September that only 20 percent of maintenance tasks account for 80 percent of the workload. Focusing on that 20 percent early in a maintainer’s career will build “a more agile base of early career maintainers,” the memo said.
The new force design is not an attempt to do more with less, said Flosi and the career field managers.
“We’re not trying to, like, squeeze 10 people’s worth of work into five people,” Flosi said in September. “We want to have the capability for an Airman to do as much as they have capacity for.”
A more agile maintainer base may help in a conflict against a technologically advanced adversary, where smaller groups of Airmen will have to generate aircraft from farther-flung airstrips. But one Air Force veteran worried the new force design does not address a fundamental problem: lack of resources.
“While the Air Force claims this policy isn’t about ‘doing more with less,’ it fails to acknowledge that the current maintenance workforce is already operating in a resource-deficient state,” said Chris McGhee, a retired master sergeant who spent 20 years fixing F-16s.
Last year, an Air Force Times investigation found a five-year high in aviation mishaps in fiscal 2023 and blamed it in part on an estimated 1,800-person shortage in a maintenance corps spread over a fleet of aging, high-demand aircraft.
By 2024, that gap shrank to about 500 maintainers, but it takes time to grow an experienced workforce, and McGhee worries the new force design will drag that out even longer.
“Under the current system, an Airman Basic begins their career in a specific specialty—like hydraulics—and focuses exclusively on building skills in that field,” he explained. “When they arrive at the hydraulic back shop, they aren’t an expert yet, but they’ve developed a solid foundation in hydraulics.”
That Airman Basic can always fill in as a generalist for more universal tasks, but if a critical hydraulic problem comes up, they have the specialized skills to fix it, he said. Switching to a generalist track early on would weaken that foundation for technical depth.
“It also undermines the flexibility to reallocate personnel effectively,” McGhee added. “Instead of being able to move a hydraulics troop to help avionics when needed—and still have a specialist for hydraulics—you end up with generalists everywhere, and specialists nowhere.”
Online commenters made similar points.
“We need technicians who have been reading wiring diagrams as their primary focus for YEARS,” wrote one Redditor who said they worked in environmental and electrical for 11 years. “I need someone who knows what a twisted pair, twisted triplet, and NDC cables are and that they can’t be spliced AT ALL.”
Hands-On
Still, other experts said they were encouraged by the prospect that younger Airmen could get more time practicing maintenance fundamentals under the new force design.
“In my opinion, it seems as if we aren’t giving maintainers a good ‘hands on’ foundation of aviation maintenance, but through the new design, every Airmen will have the opportunity to understand basic aircraft principles practically instead of theatrically through in-class training,” one anonymous production superintendent told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Despite today’s emphasis on specializing early on, the superintendent said he has seen fuels technicians not know how to refuel or defuel their own aircraft, as well as hydraulics technicians who do not know how to verify a jet’s hydraulics system is depressurized.
“In my experience, our Airmen aren’t lazy or unintelligent,” he said. “They are frustrated because they don’t get enough reps in the fundamentals before having to become a specialist.”
The superintendent said he benefited from a flying crew chief prospect program which taught him the fundamentals of aircraft maintenance. Despite starting out as a hydraulics specialist, he soon became qualified on every maintenance task on the C-130.
Once Airmen gain a solid foundation and have a chance to specialize, the new force design may help keep those experienced Airmen on the flight line, said another anonymous maintenance NCO.
Under the current system, maintainers may start out in a specialized track, but by the time they become a noncommissioned officer, they have to take on leadership roles to stay competitive in the promotion cycle.
“If you’re a tech sergeant on the flight line, you might be the most capable mechanic, but you’re not looked at as being successful because you haven’t been a flight chief,” he said. “An Airman can say ‘I can learn how to change this brake really well, or I can find things to do that show me being a capable leader.’”
A commenter on Facebook who said they are a career crew chief made a similar point.
“By the time they [Airmen] got or started to be experts in their career field, they then got into management,” the commenter wrote in a message posted by the administrator of the unofficial Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page. “By the time one got to E-5 [staff sergeant] he was not [sic] longer turning wrenches full time.”
The new technical track could let experienced NCOs stay hands-on rather than lose their edge in managerial roles. It may also be a chance to re-emphasize the value of technical proficiency.
“What the Air Force has valued, to me, has been leadership skills, but what the Air Force needs is technical skills,” the anonymous NCO said.
More Adaptable
A maintenance corps made up of more generalized junior Airmen guided by lifelong technical experts may help prepare the force for operating future platforms whose maintenance needs could look different than today’s fleet. Air Force officials envision a future with more expendable uncrewed aircraft whose service life may be measured in years rather than decades, though it is not clear how close that future might be amid tight budgets and shifting defense priorities.
“What I see is they are trying to make the career field more adaptable to whatever comes next,” the anonymous NCO said.
For example, the new force design emphasizes that maintainers will be platform-agnostic unless they join the technical track. By contrast, in today’s system, a C-5 maintainer can sign off on an actuator on the jet’s wing, but they may not be qualified to sign off on the same actuator on the tail of a C-17.
There are valid safety reasons why that’s the case, the NCO said, but it could be a hindrance in a future conflict where Airmen may have to jerry-rig maintenance solutions to launch aircraft from an isolated field in the Pacific.
Implementing the force design will be difficult, said the superintendent, who worried about burnout and clashes between leadership and technical tracks amid a changing cultural dynamic and a nonstop high operational tempo.
“My biggest concern is how do you hold onto the experience long enough to train the maintainers during this transition?” he said. “I worry we might slow promotions and overwork our remaining experts to fill the gaps during the transition.”
Even if the Air force sticks the landing, it will take time for the seeds of such a large transformation to bear fruit. The first generalist track Airmen won’t join the service until 2027.
“People have to buy into it, and they’re probably not going to at first because they’re not used to it,” the NCO said. “It’s a big step in a different direction, but I think it’s necessary.”