How Having an A&P Benefitted Me Part 7

So, I had just been laid off from the Part 135 operator and had a young family to take care of. I still had my weekender slot in the ANG which provided a little money and benefits, but certainly not enough.

I should mention one benefit of being in the Guard and Reserves that not many people know about, and the recruiters don’t mention either. If you find yourself out of work, you can let your military boss know and they can sometimes put you on orders to help out. It might only be a few weeks, or it could be longer. It all depends on how many days they have left in the pot, and they might also be able to put you on as a Temp Technician which is longer duration and could lead into a full-time civil service or AGR job. In any case I didn’t go this route, partly because my Guard unit was a 1.5 hour drive from my home.

There is another side note where my A&P could have helped in my Air Guard career. Our maintenance commander had heard about my work as an A&P and also good feedback from my supervisor about my experience level. On two separate occasions he asked me to apply for a commission. I took the exams and passed but they didn’t have aircraft maintenance officer positions open and there was no way I wanted to be in Finance or some other such nonsense, so I declined. Yes I know the pay would have been higher but I would have hated the work and would probably have gotten kicked out.

Anyway, back to being out of work. As it turned out I heard about a local aviation museum that was being built and they needed someone to help restore some aircraft for display. If you are ever in the Hampton Roads area, drop by the Virginia Air & Space Science Center. The aircraft I helped with are the F-84 and F-104, both of which are hanging from the ceiling and the ceiling thing is why they wanted an A&P. The aircraft needed to be modified for suspension and the insurance company said the mods needed to be done by an A&P. So voila! A job. It didn’t pay super well but it took care of most of the expenses, and it was interesting work for a few months.

Now here’s where things took a little twist. As I noted the museum job didn’t pay very well so I was keeping my eyes open for other work and back in the olden days of 1991 the way you found jobs was in the newspaper. Yep, very Fred Flintstone. You looked in a section called “Help Wanted” and had to scan the short job descriptions in these ads. One day an ad caught my eye that said they wanted technicians at a place called CEBAF and it said they preferred A&P mechanics. I called and they wanted to interview me right away. When I arrived the sign outside said, “Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility’ and in smaller letters “Operated for the Department of Energy.” Today it’s called Jefferson Labs but at the time I had no idea what I was walking into. It certainly had no airplanes or runways.

As it turned out it was a nuclear physics research lab and they were building something like a supercollider. They wanted people who knew how to use precision tools, could read technical drawings, and follow detailed instructions. The HR person told me that they found that A&P mechanics fit the bill nicely. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I helped build the accelerator portion of this amazing facility and learned tons about physics. I worked in a Class IV cleanroom, messed around with hydrofluoric acid and liquid helium, and built test equipment prototypes for physicists. In a nutshell the technology used superconducting cells and rf energy to accelerate and electron beam up to the speed of light and then steer it into test targets.

I worked there for a couple of years as a contract employee until one fateful day when I was called in and asked if I wanted to become a full-time permanent technician. It was a huge pay raise and excellent job stability. That afternoon while I was talking to my wife about it the phone rang. It was an HR person from an airline that I had applied at a year earlier and they wanted to interview me. Was this going to be another fork in the road?

If you want to know more about Jefferson Labs you can check it out here: https://www.jlab.org/about Next episode – airline job or stay in physics research.