alt Hacker NewsAmerican Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died
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A buddy of mine is the son of a United Airlines mechanic who was fairly high up in the organization. When his dad passed United gave him a stack of blank wax tickets. His son could write the destination on them and fly for free. Near the end of the stack they were largely ornamental as he could just tell them where he wanted to go and they would print a proper ticket. But still, it was a rather classy way to honor his father.
If you're interested in commercial aircraft and their maintenance process, check out Stig Shift on YouTube. He's another AA mechanic based in LAX, and makes interesting videos with some technical deep dives interspersed with planespotting.
How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every single time.
OT, but Azriel/Azrael translates to the Grim Reaper/Angel of Death [0].
Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
Al: middle class, unassuming, regular joe.
Azriel: All mighty servant of Yahweh. He who cleaves soul from body, angel of death. Archangel.
80 years if career? Is that even possible? I mean if that is true definitely he was good at his job that his employer did not want him to leave or he was really really loving his job that he was the best at it.
"just 50 cents per hour" which was 1.66x minimum wage at the time.
Dear God, I hope he transferred that knowledge the best he could.
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I read this as American Airlines not offering sufficient retirement funding to it's staff that they have to keep working into their 90s
I worked at the AA maintenance base in Tulsa and retired after thirty years. Although I worked in the power plant and was not an A&P mechanic, over the years I had the pleasure of working around some of the thousands of plane mechanics employed on the base. I even had an ex brother-in-law who was a dock crew chief on one of the 737 lines.
I was always impressed by how seriously they took their jobs and how they were quick to tell anyone that they knew people's live could be at stake. The complexity of the work made experienced and long career hands absolutely necessary. The gravity of the job always weighs heavy on new hires and the help they received can't be measured. The online and classroom training that all receive during the length of their careers is extensive.
In all the many different trades at the base, two jokes were always told and I guarantee they're still being told today: Classroom training taught me how to drink coffee. And they wouldn't fly on AA because they knew the guys who worked on the planes. (The first one is absolutely true. The second was is not, especially after the company started flying to New Zealand!)