The Complete Guide to Becoming An Aircraft Structure, Surface, Rigging, and Systems Assembler

Chapter 1: What Does a Aircraft Structure, Surface, Rigging, and Systems Assembler Actually Do?

When people tell you they build airplanes for a living, your mind probably jumps to a massive hangar, a half-finished fuselage, and someone in a jumpsuit with a rivet gun. That mental picture is not wrong, but it leaves out a lot of the detail. The official job title - aircraft structure, surface, rigging, and systems assembler - is a long name for a person who does one very specific thing: takes the parts of an aircraft that someone else has manufactured and puts them together in the exact right order, to the exact right specifications, so that the finished machine is safe to fly. You are not designing the plane. You are not engineering it. You are building it, with your hands, using tools, following drawings, and checking your work against standards that can be measured in thousandths of an inch.

There are roughly 40,000 people doing this job in the United States right now, and they work primarily in a handful of states where the major aircraft manufacturers and their suppliers have set up shop: Washington, California, Texas, Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama. The biggest employer is clearly Boeing, with Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and a long tail of smaller subcontractors picking up the rest. What that means for you is that this is not a job you can do from anywhere. You go to where the airplanes are built, not the other way