![My 36 year old clipboard from when I started at Boeing. Engineering ruler and fastener/fastener hole cheat sheets. [Credit: Andrew Robinson]](https://www.kitplanes.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Liaison_clipboard.jpg?resize=1024,682)
This column is geared more toward the younger crowd looking to enter aviation, so if you know anyone that might benefit from this, please pass it along to them. One of the first things I tell the kids at the youth build sessions is that you never know what skill set will get you hired. At my very first interview that led to an aerospace job, I watched a guy with an MIT degree and work experience walk out the door with a “thanks, we’ll be in touch” type message, and I truly figured that if they weren’t that interested in him that I had no chance. Then during the interview, the person who was to be my future boss kept asking me about the time spent with my dad and grandfather, who were both talented mechanics and machinists. As unexpected as that was, a bigger surprise was being offered a job on the spot!
Sometime later after getting settled in at my new job, I ask why me and not some of those other seemingly qualified people at the hiring event, and the response was, “I am tired of hiring well-educated idiots.” Alrighty then. My boss went on to explain that an engineer, particularly a liaison engineer, cannot design complicated repairs that can’t be fabricated by the guys in the hangar. He also added that I had the hands-on experience to be able to talk with the mechanics on the flight line. I did not fully appreciate this until many years later when we had a younger engineer who rotated from the design group to the liaison team for additional experience. He may have been talented enough as a designer, but he was a bit high-strung and was never very comfortable talking to the guys in the shop, and soon enough found himself back in the design group.
Another excellent, very important piece of advice from my first boss: “Don’t come in here with your shiny new degree thinking you know everything, and sure as [expletive] don’t talk down to the guys in the shop. They’ve been here doing this for years and will eat you up if you do.” I made sure to abide by that, and after years in the factory and on the flight line, I was able to see how accurate that advice was.
My next aviation job was in large part due to being able to write; at the in-person interview my hiring manager and future boss pulled out my letter of application and held it up and waved it around saying, “You can write!” He went on to say that it was one thing to know your stuff, but to be able to put it down on paper for someone to be able to read and convey that knowledge was a rare thing. So, much to my surprise, my writing skills helped me get that second job.
Both of those jobs were in liaison engineering, which are the engineers that are out on the factory floor or the flight line, and they are the interface between the company and the design team and the mechanics and technicians. When inevitable boo-boos happen during manufacturing, the liaison engineers are the guys who call out the fixes and repairs. For instance, when we were modifying 747’s into special freighters, the new floor beams that were being installed were made with pilot holes per the prints, but as we quickly found out, the aircraft were not always built exactly to the prints and the pilot holes did not necessarily lineup with where the existing holes were on the fuselage frames.
Enter the liaison engineer to write a disposition calling out to plug the pilot hole and drill a new one that aligns with the fuselage frame, or to pull the hole far enough that the pilot hole would be fully enveloped by the eventual fastener. In another instance, the night before a modified aircraft was to be delivered to the customer somebody ran a scissor lift into the fuselage, leaving a large dent. A senior liaison engineer was called in (with newbie me observing) to design a flush repair patch that would be installed and completed on second shift so that the customer did not reject the aircraft they were taking delivery of the next morning. Or in one of my more interesting repairs, an overhead crane ran into the vertical fin of an aircraft that was moving its way down the assembly line. Interesting for me in the sense that it was a fairly complex repair that took me time to draw up and make sure all details were accounted for. Rather expensive and not any fun for the company, but fun for me in that it tested my skills.
A lot of the repairs, however, are much more mundane: mis-drilled holes, short edge distance, shimming gaps, etc. And I can very candidly say that one of my initial stints of liaison engineering was less than fun when I was assigned to scrapping parts in the back shop. In that role, the job was a mix of seeing if the parts were salvageable and calling out a disposition to be able to use them, or simply confirming that they were scrap and writing a disposition to do so. I do recall one item that had been sawed completely in half, the clear message being that the shop knew it was unusable, didn’t want it on the airplane and wanted to be sure no attempt was made to salvage it, but they still needed the engineer signature to scrap it. Assignments like that may not be exciting, but can be an opportunity to learn and study for advancement opportunities.
For those not familiar with the role, liaison engineering is still very much an apprenticeship in that you shadow a more senior engineer to learn the most common incidents and repairs and you start writing out dispositions on how you think it should be fixed with their guidance, but your dispositions need to be cosigned by a senior engineer that has their stamp. By stamp I mean what used to be a physical ink stamp that was applied to the repair disposition along with a signature. Stamps were numbered and identified a particular engineer; that said, when I last worked in the industry over a dozen years ago, dispositions were entered on a computer screen, and your “stamp” was in a database.
Back to getting your signature authority – after a period of creating repairs with less guidance, or needing input from the senior engineers, your fellow liaison engineers confer, and if they decide that you are ready, then you are also added to the materiel review board (MRB) and receive your own stamp. In piloting terms, it’s the equivalent of being signed off to fly solo and means that your signature has the authority to authorize a repair. Kinda scary at first, not unlike those first solo flights.
As one senior engineer told me: once you have your signature authority, you have it and it’s a good thing to have. On this I will wholeheartedly concur, because once you have that signature authority, you have a skill set that is in demand and is needed by an aircraft company as long as they are producing airplanes; this can also include vendors making subassemblies. I have fallen back on that skill set a couple of times when I have been laid off elsewhere and needed work. Even though I eventually did structures design, avionics, and systems engineering, that MRB stamp has continued to prove its value, and it may yet again after I retire from telecom.
And there’s the thing: I still get emails at least once a week for contract MRB assignments for six, nine, and 12 month or longer contracts. Is liaison engineering glamorous? Not really. And at this point, cue the laughter of all the older aerospace engineers at the notion that aerospace engineering is terribly glamorous. To the surprise of younger me, it mostly is not (just dang). On the other hand, liaison engineers are out on the factory floor and on the flight line with their hands on the aircraft being produced or modified. There’s nothing like starting your morning sitting on the horizontal tail of a 747 or walking along the wing of a C-130 and watching the sun come up. Not a lot of people get to do that.
I was told early in my career that ten years of liaison engineering is one year of experience ten times over. There is a grain of truth to that statement, in that many of the repairs can be rather repetitive, but there is still a wealth of knowledge to be gained from multiple years of experience in the role and all the different situations that can arise. In addition, becoming so intimately familiar with the aircraft and how they are built is good background for other positions such as: design, systems engineering, or flight test, just to name a few.
Like being hands-on with the aircraft? Don’t want to be at a desk all day? Want a skill set that won’t be replaced by AI? You may want to explore liaison engineering.
This article first appeared in the 2026 August Issue of KITPLANES magazine.
