Aerospace Ground Equipment is a career field that’s designed to support aircraft while they’re on the ground doing maintenance or to also make sure they have what they need to launch. We’re working with gas turbine engines, diesels, electronics, hydraulics, air compressors, nitrogen generation. Age mechanics do it all.
I’m Airman Basic Andrew Gutierrez. I’m from Tomball, Texas, and I’m currently here in tech training for aerospace ground equipment. It’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s new stuff that I’ve I’ve never experienced before. While it still is a mechanical job, it’s completely different from changing the oil on my Mustang.
I’m Master Sergeant Patrick Gysik. I’m from Bellingham, Washington, and I’m an aerospace ground equipment instructor. We want to make sure that our airmen have a solid background in basic electronics before they move on to the systems that support these aircraft on the flight line.
I hope that one day I would be surrounded by aircraft such as these, like the C 130, this F-16. Just being near them is awesome.
The piece of equipment that you’re looking at right here, this is a Dash 86 diesel generator. This is our bread and butter, power generation. That’s what you’re going to spend the majority of your time working on.
It is a turbine engine. It’s like a mini jet engine which rotates at 42,000 RPM.
The same What we use in our aircraft, we can use in this generator.
What this piece of equipment does is provide power to the aircraft, along with bleed air for engine start.
As an aerospace ground equipment instructor, of course, our major job is to teach the students about the equipment, make them comfortable with it, how to operate it properly and safely. Once you leave tech school, you’ll go wherever the planes go, whether that’s a base in the United States, in Europe, or some forward deployed location where we’ve never been. If the planes are there, you’ll be there.