AMTonline Blogs

I just received good news from AMTA director and AMTSociety board member Ken MacTiernan. He shares that we are closer than ever to getting a national AMT Day resolution passed by the U.S. Congress. House Resolution #444 goes before the Transportation & Infrastructure committee on Thursday, August 2 for a vote. When passed, it will go on to the House floor for a final vote.

We still need to pull together and contact our U.S. representative and urge them to support HR 444 when it comes up for a vote. I just did. I wrote a letter to my representative Tammy Baldwin. Here is what it said:

31 August, 2007

The Honorable Tammy Baldwin

2446 Rayburn Building

Representative Baldwin,

I am writing once again to ask for your support of HR 444 — a resolution that is sponsored by Representative Bob Filner of California that will declare May 24 of each year as Aviation Maintenance Technician (AMT) Day.

May 24 is the birth date of Charles E. Taylor, the unsung hero in aviation who designed and built the engine for the Wright Brothers that powered the Wright Flyer into the history books. Taylor is recognized as the first aircraft mechanic.

Like Charles Taylor in his day, today’s aircraft maintenance professionals are hard working men and women who ensure the airworthiness of our civil aircraft fleet.

I had contacted you a few weeks back asking you to sign on as a co-sponsor to HR 444. I have heard that the resolution is moving forward. It is on the calendar for an August 2 vote in the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee. When passed, it will be scheduled for a vote on the House floor. Even though you did not sign on as a co-sponsor the resolution, I am asking for your support when the resolution comes up for a vote on the House floor. Wisconsin has deep ties in aviation. It is home to the Experimental Aircraft Association which hosts the world’s largest fly-in at Oshkosh, WI each summer, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors and billions of dollars in revenue for our state. Wisconsin is also home to Midwest Airlines and Air Wisconsin. Aircraft Maintenance Technology, the magazine I oversee, is based in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. It is the only aircraft maintenance magazine approved by both the FAA and Transport Canada for recurrency training.

I ask you to support HR 444 by voting “Yes” when the resolution comes up for a vote on the house floor. You can help give aircraft maintenance professionals in the United States and its territories the recognition they have long deserved.

Thank you,

Joe Escobar

FAA certified Airframe & Powerplant mechanic/IA #3019874

900 Van Buren St.

Fort Atkinson, WI 53538

I encourage you to write a similar letter to your representative. Make it short and to the point. It should be personal in nature, expressing why you are asking for his or her support for the resolution. To contact your representative, or to look up who your representative is, go to www.house.gov.

Let your voice be heard! Take a few moments to write your representative and ask for his or her support of HR #444.

Thanks for reading.

Joe Escobar

Greetings from Oshkosh, Wisconsin where the AMT team is on the road this week attending the annual EAA AirVenture show. There is plenty to see and do so this week’s blog is shorter than usual. Be sure to visit the news section of amtonline.com this week to find out more about what’s going on.

Do you have a story about Oshkosh that you would like to share with the readers? If so, please submit a comment below and share your experiences and memories from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

By the way, we have a new tool beneath our photo slideshow on our homepage where you can submit your photos. So if you do have any photos from Oshkosh or others that you would like to share with the readers, click on the link below the slideshow to submit a photo.

Thanks for reading!

It is official. Airline employment is up. The Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) reports today that the airlines employed 0.3 percent more workers in May 2007 than in May of 2006.

Although not groundbreaking news in and of itself, it is a milestone of sorts. This is the first monthly increase in employment in a long time. In fact, if you want to find the last time monthly employment increased, you would have to go all the way back to August 2001, the month before 9/11.

That’s a long time — 68 straight months of declines in employment at the airlines.

We will have to wait to see if this is just an anomaly or the start of an upward trend in employment. I would guess the latter. After all, where else do the airlines have to go but up? Surely the airlines can’t cut any more jobs, can they?

To read the full report, click here.

What do you think?

Joe Escobar

In the July issue of AMT, we published an article by Bill O’Brien titled Open Letter: AMT Day Recognition. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to click on the link above to read it now. O’Brien discusses how to contact your U.S. Congressmen and Senators to get them to support the National AMT Day resolution being introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

I am no stranger to contacting my representatives. A few years back, I asked our State representative David Ward to sponsor a bill proclaiming May 24 of each year as AMT Day in Wisconsin. He agreed, and on June 10, 2003, a joint resolution was passed proclaiming May 24 each year as AMT Day in Wisconsin. The process was fairly easy. But Representative Ward wouldn’t have acted on his own. It took me asking him to introduce the resolution to get it done.

It’s time to ask our U.S. Senators and Congressmen to support the National AMT Day resolution. Ken MacTiernan did his part — he flew to D.C. and met with his Congressman, the Honorable Robert Filner and asked him to introduce a resolution proclaiming May 24 as National AMT Day. Congressman Filner agreed, and did his part by introducing the resolution. It’s time for us to do our part and garner support and co-sponsors for Congressman Filner’s resolution to get this legislation pushed forward.

I did my part earlier today. It was quite easy. I logged on to www.house.gov. I entered my Zip Code +4 and was directed to my U.S. Congresswoman — the Honorable Tammy Baldwin. There was a form on her website to submit a letter, and I submitted a short letter to her using some of Bill O’Brien’s verbiage from his article and adding some of my own.

Next, I went to www.senate.gov. I clicked on “WI” on the drop-down menu at the top of the page to find my two Senators. I went to each of their websites and wrote each one a short letter based on the letter I had already submitted to Congresswoman Baldwin.

The whole process took less than 20 minutes.

So, are you ready do your part and invest 20 minutes of your time to help make the National AMT Day resolution a reality? I can’t do it by myself. A dozen of us can’t do it by ourselves. It will take all of us to do our part. We need to flood the Senate and House with tens of thousands of letters!

The wrench is in your hands now! Don’t let this opportunity pass us by. Don’t let this die on the vine because you assume someone else will write his or her letters.

Thanks for reading!

Joe Escobar

Not too long ago, I was talking with an AMT reader about the magazine and about aircraft maintenance in general. During the conversation, I asked him why he got into aircraft maintenance. He said his father was an aircraft mechanic and he just ended up following in his footsteps. He remembered when he was growing up that he would hang out at the hangar where his dad worked and bug the mechanics, asking if he could do something to help out. Aviation became a part of who he was.

That got me thinking. We get lots of feedback on the current state of the industry. We hear about the job losses, the pay cuts, the poor working conditions, etc., etc… We have heard people tell us why they are leaving the industry. But we don’t hear the stories of why we pursued aircraft maintenance to begin with.

So, why did you get into aircraft maintenance?

I’ll start the ball rolling. It was kind of by accident for me. It was the late ’80s, and I was in college pursuing a degree in petroleum engineering. The oilfield crashed, and the oilfield industry went from boom to bust just about overnight. Not knowing what I wanted to do, I took a job washing airplanes at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, TX. That’s where the aviation bug bit me. What started off as a temporary job to make some money and decide what I wanted to do, ended up being the start of my career in aircraft maintenance. Thanks to encouragement and support from my supervisors and co-workers, I ended up getting my A&P certificate and later, my inspection authorization.

So, what’s your story?

Thanks for reading!

Joe Escobar