Jennifer Morgan’s day at work at Southwest Airlines includes strapping herself to a harness and standing on top of a Boeing 737.
She does it while sporting her signature tall blonde hair and a Southwest blue button-up shirt. The 52-year-old is known as “Powder” to her colleagues — almost all of whom are men. She’s an inspector for Southwest’s technical operation and she sees herself as one of the guys.
“Everybody treats you, even if you’re older than them, they treat you like a little sister,” Morgan said. “They always check on you. Not that I need to be checked on. There’s no animosity as you would think in a lot of fields”.
In a career that sees the least amount of women representation for the aviation industry, of all aircraft maintenance technicians, women only make up 2.6% of the field, according to Women in Aviation International.
The advocacy group’s 2022 recommendations report said that Boeing forecast over the next 20 years, 626,000 maintenance technicians will be needed worldwide.
Maintenance technicians are often the people behind the scenes, diagnosing mechanical and technical issues of different aircraft.
On a perfect day, according to Stacey Rudser, president of the Association for Women in Aviation Maintenance, the job is designed to be invisible. Most of the work is done at night when planes are grounded, Rudser said.
“If there’s something we need to resolve on a flight, usually a passenger can’t really see us, like changing a tire on certain types of aircraft,” Rudser said, noting the career’s visibility problem. “You and the passengers aren’t gonna see that.”
Rudser said the job goes unnoticed, where it has become easier to point young girls to more visible careers such as pilots or engineers. It’s a profession that is still seen as blue-collar when Rudser would rather think of it as “gray-collar,” based on how sophisticated the aircraft maintenance technicians’ work has become.
Aviation is a culture that hasn’t quite caught up to be a welcoming environment for women, Rudser said, but the work being done now is more than it has ever been before.
Evie Garces, 42, American Airlines’ vice president of line maintenance, is the first Hispanic woman to take on the leadership position at American. Her parents were immigrants from the Dominican Republic and she grew up in New York.
Evie Garces, vice president of line maintenance at American Airlines(American Airlines)
Aviation High School caught her attention and she took the New York City subway at 14 years old to get to school every day. Garces later earned her airframe and powerplant license.
Out of high school, she worked at Tower Air, a now-defunct airline once based out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
“My first paycheck was more than what my Dad made,” Garces said. “That was an eye-opening experience for me because not only was I making more than my Dad, but I was making more than my Dad straight out of high school without any college education”…
