The U.S. Air Force's plan to consolidate more than 50 job specialties into just seven has triggered concern among current and former aircraft maintainers who warn the overhaul could magnify deep-rooted issues in a career field already plagued by overwork, unsafe conditions and leadership misconduct.
Air Force officials say that the move to combine job types will reduce training time constraints and make more troops ready to deploy by allowing leaders the flexibility to assign airmen to a variety of aircraft types.
"Fifty-four of them are types of aircraft, 54 different specific career paths. … That's just not going to work in this environment," Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Flosi said in an October 2024 Military.com interview. "We need airmen who can operate in a variety of environments without being constrained by overly rigid specialty boundaries."
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However, 11 maintainers and former maintainers who spoke to Military.com, including a mix of recent veterans and personnel with experience spanning more than two decades, described an environment in which airmen are already facing steep challenges that are likely to be exacerbated by the change.
The group represents a range of specialties and roles within aircraft and weapons maintenance, as well as some former service members now working in veteran advocacy.
"Maintenance has been in a bad way for 20 years; this reorganization is going to add to the stress," said Chris McGhee, a retired master sergeant who served in maintenance for 20 years. He is now a lawyer focused on representing veterans.
Critics of the planned consolidation of Air Force Specialty Codes, or AFSCs, say that the change runs the risk of increasing workloads by forcing maintenance personnel to learn a broader set of skills with less specific training. That's on top of existing problems impacting the community including excessive hours and unsafe scheduling that have spanned presidential administrations and changes in military and civilian leadership.
For maintainers like Micah Templin, a former member of the 57th Maintenance Wing at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, the taxing shifts became unbearable.
"You're only supposed to be on an off-shift for three months, rotating through, so everyone gets a turn throughout the year," said Templin. He says that he was assigned night shifts for upward of a year at a time, or at other times had his shifts constantly changed, making it difficult to sleep.
"I'd be on days one week, then have just the weekend to adjust my entire sleep schedule, which is actually impossible to shift your circadian rhythm," he said.
Nellis is one of the most mission-critical bases in the Air Force, often serving as the final training stop for pilots before deployment to combat missions. Nellis also facilitates Red Flag, an intensive training exercise for the U.S. military and invited foreign allies. However, the Air Force's heap of responsibilities comes at a steep personal cost for the maintainers who keep the planes operational.
According to a 2020 article published by the 57th Wing's Public Affairs Office, Nellis supports up to 40,000 sorties, or military flights, annually. These missions include foreign allies such as Germany, Australia and other training partners.
Behind the high-stakes training cycles at Nellis and Red Flag, maintainers endure grueling round-the-clock shifts, erratic sleep cycles and workloads that extend far beyond typical military duty. These issues are not new but systemic, having afflicted maintainers at Nellis for decades, according to the maintainers who spoke to Military.com. They have created a culture in which burnout, mental health concerns and significantly decreased quality of life aren't just common, they're expected by base leadership. The Air Force as a whole has implemented regulations to prevent these practices, but those regulations have largely been ignored.
Nine airmen who served in the 57th Maintenance Wing between 2013 and 2024, across multiple leadership structures, voiced the same concerns: chronic undermanning, work hours that violated Air Force policy, and disregard for service instructions meant to ensure personnel safety. Some say they were even pressured to lie or misreport to leadership.
Air Force policy limits maintenance shifts to 12 hours. Shifts may be extended to 16 hours with squadron commander approval and can exceed 16 hours only with commander approval under exceptional circumstances.
"I would probably say we worked between 12- to 14-hour days consecutively for months and sometimes had to come in on the weekends for the whole unit," said Michael Hudson, a former F-16 Fighting Falcon maintainer attached to the Viper Air Maintenance Unit, known as the 64th Aggressor Squadron, and before that the A-10 Thunderbolt II AMU. "It was tough physically and mentally and was a big part of why I decided to get out, because I was burnt out so badly."
Hudson was an aircraft armament systems specialist from 2010 until 2016, serving at Nellis in the 57th Wing from 2013 to 2016.
"I was unaware up until now that those were the regulations for hours. Those regulations were never brought up to me," he said. "There came a point where leadership would ask you to move AIM-120s, and you'd be like, 'I can't do it, I'm past my 12-hour mark,' and they look at you like you're a freaking idiot, and then tell you to go work on a pylon."
Military.com contacted Nellis Air Force Base's public affairs office to address allegations involving unsafe working conditions and scheduling practices within the maintenance community. Military.com also asked for current approximate staffing levels and maintenance personnel numbers.
Several months after initially sending questions, a Nellis media email account sent a note that said the installation has "full confidence in the current leadership overseeing our maintenance units" and that "support for mental health and fostering positive work environments are a top priority for the 57th Wing."
Requests from Military.com to identify the spokesperson who sent the email received no response nor did the message answer any of the publication’s specific questions about manning levels and safety violations raised by multiple former airmen.
Military.com also contacted Air Force Headquarters to ask about the issues the maintainers described at other bases, but did not receive a response before publication.
Former Staff Sgt. Dallas Sharrah, who served in the 57th Wing from 2017 to 2024, including a period in the Viper AMU, said the practice of working beyond mandated hours without proper approval continued as recently as 2024.
Sharrah said the unpredictability of the work environment contributed significantly to his daily anxiety. "You never know what the hell is going to happen day to day," he said. "I could show up, and I'm working 12-hour shifts and getting screamed at by pro-super [production superintendent] for eight of it because I'm not moving fast enough. Or I could show up and get sent home immediately."
Decades of Strain
The consolidation of job designations focuses on 2A AFSCs, a family of specialty codes covering a wide range of aircraft maintenance roles. These airmen are responsible for inspecting, repairing and maintaining the mechanical and electrical systems on both fighter jets and larger cargo or transport aircraft. Despite the varying job titles and functions, experts like McGhee stress that aircraft maintenance functions are deeply interconnected. They argue that the cultural and structural problems within maintenance extend far beyond a single specialty code, affecting nearly all airmen tasked with keeping the fleet operational.
"Each Air Force Specialty Code has cultural idiosyncrasies, but maintenance culture and abuse transcends the granular career divides," McGhee said.
Those issues center around the hours. Aircraft maintenance in the Air Force is divided into day, swing and mid shifts, which take place overnight. Air Force instructions specify how long personnel can be assigned to off shifts that disrupt their natural sleep cycles, as the adverse effects on mental health have been well documented.
A 2024 Government Accountability Office report, GAO-24-105917, found that many Air Force personnel were averaging just six hours of sleep per night. The resulting fatigue was linked to increased risks of substance abuse, safety incidents and declining mental health.
Maintainers must be provided a rest period allowing at least eight hours of uninterrupted sleep within a 24-hour period to support safety and mental health, according to the regulations.
That requirement is routinely ignored, something that is largely tied to sudden changes to shifts, the maintainers who spoke to Military.com said. There's a documented history of problems providing adequate management of maintainer shifts.
In a 1991 decision, the Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that Nellis base leadership violated the rights of civilian maintainers by changing their shifts without proper notice. The case, brought by the American Federation of Government Employees, found that management, military leadership included, failed to honor negotiated agreements on shift assignments. The FLRA held that union members have the right to negotiate schedules based on health and personal well-being, and said the abrupt changes were too disruptive and violated established work conditions.
Active-duty maintainers, however, do not have the same protections. The toll of such erratic schedules, Templin said, leads to mistakes and confusion.
"I started showing up to the wrong shifts or missing them entirely," he said. "There were a couple of weeks when you were doing multiple shifts throughout the same week, and that didn't happen to the people who were in good with the flight chiefs. If you were social, talking with people, you could get away with it. But for the rest of us, leadership got what shifts they wanted."
Hudson's three years at Nellis overlapped with sequestration, a period of budget cuts by the Air Force and Department of Defense that reduced maintenance crews to skeleton levels and led to the dismantling of units like the 65th Aggressor Squadron, the historic F-15 counterpart to the 64th Aggressors.
"We were undermanned, understaffed, underequipped -- you name it," Hudson said. "Life was hard."
Burnout and Alleged Safety Violations
The long shifts that stretch far beyond what regulations allow create compounding risks to mental and physical health for airmen, the maintainers who spoke to Military.com said.
"Most of the high stress came from the long hours," said former Senior Airman Foy, who requested that his first name not be used due to concerns of retaliation. "We were only approved for nine-hour shifts, but we stayed for 13 to 15 hours. That's illegal, you know what I mean? The demands took a toll on my marriage and definitely on my mental health, to say the least."
Foy, as well as the other maintainers interviewed for this story, also said black-flag temperature safety protocols, rules designed to limit strenuous work in excessively hot conditions to avoid injury, were often ignored by senior leadership and treated more as suggestions than guidelines.
According to Air Force regulations, a black-flag heat condition is called whenever Wet Bulb Globe Temperatures exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The WBGT is a composite heat measurement that accounts for temperature, humidity, wind and sunlight to gauge the risk of heat-related illness. Under Black Flag conditions, nonessential outdoor activity is supposed to be suspended, and mission-essential tasks should be limited to prevent heat-related injuries.
During the summer of 2018, when former Senior Airman Foy was working day shifts that often exceeded 10 hours, the highest recorded temperature in Las Vegas reached 115 degrees. Foy said several units at Nellis during that time didn't have adequate coverage for maintainers, who sometimes had to work outside directly in the searing Mojave Desert sun for hours on end.
"Black-flag conditions felt like they were optional, which shouldn't be a thing," Foy said. "We had somebody fall out because they were dehydrated, and there were times when black-flag conditions were called and nobody told us until later on in our shifts."
The combination of physically taxing work through difficult conditions and hours has added up to lingering health effects for some airmen.
"It's something I go to mental health at the VA for and still struggle with," Hudson said. "I don't like the term PTSD for what I dealt with because I never had anything I'd consider traumatic happen. I often call it post prolonged stress syndrome. You go through so many prolonged, high-stress environments that I dream about it. I'll have dreams where I wake up feeling like I'm not prepared for the turn. It's like those dreams where you're naked in a classroom."
The mental strain from prolonged exposure to extreme stress lingers for Hudson long after his separation.
"It was a decade ago, but that stress, that anxiety -- it stays with you," he said.
Excessive drinking is common among maintainers, who often turn to alcohol as a legal coping mechanism for the daily stressors experienced on duty.
Sharrah, who served in the 57th Wing, also spent time with the 80th Fighter Generation Squadron at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea.
"Korea is a whole different beast. The culture of drinking there is unbelievable," Sharrah said. "It's a unit-run bar on base, and everybody, from command to first sergeants down to the brand-new airman first class, is taking shots at an open bar. Now, I didn't see any real pressure to drink, but when your command is taking shots, are you really going to say no?"
The level of drinking reached a dangerous threshold, Sharrah said.
"I had dudes in Korea who were so drunk we were literally carrying them home because they couldn't walk and were vomiting on themselves. They could have died. And this was an every-weekend occurrence," Sharrah said.
Alcoholism in the maintenance community is often a symptom of a culture in which airmen are overworked, and where mental health struggles are stigmatized. Feelings of hopelessness or of being trapped are commonly expressed by maintainers. These conditions can prevent individuals from seeking help before it's too late.
These cultural problems within maintenance could get worse for maintainers with the consolidation of jobs, given the added stressors, the current and former maintainers who spoke to Military.com said.
"It's going to come down to how it's implemented, but also, it's a solution seeking a problem," McGhee said.
McGhee said that the planned reorganization would be difficult even if the career field wasn't facing other problems.
"I blame maintenance leadership more than I blame the commanders and the operations squadrons, because they have a different job. They trust the maintenance leadership that they're taking care of their people, and they weren't," Templin said.
-- Austin Campbell is a former Air Force maintainer and investigative journalist covering military culture, policy and enlisted life. He holds a master's degree in strategic communication from the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and focuses on systemic issues affecting airmen.
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