Air Force Adjusting Plan for Maintenance Career Overhaul from Just 7 AFSCs to 14

The Air Force will officially kick off a major overhaul of maintenance career field next year with a pilot program, but the plan for the revamp is still evolving—while officials once intended to condense 50 aircraft maintenance specialties down to just seven, now they are targeting 14 Air Force Specialty Codes, according to Lt. Gen. Kenyon K. Bell.

Bell, deputy chief of staff for logistics, engineering, and force protection, told Air & Space Forces Magazine in a recent interview that the sweeping effort will be “a multiyear transformation” how the Air Force recruits, trains, and develops its maintenance force, suggesting it will be quite a while before that transformation is complete.

“The two-way career field strategy is on track to initiate [an 18-month] pilot test in mid- to late-2027,” said Bell, who added, “It’s going to be a yearslong effort for this to take place.”

The service first revealed its career field transformation plan for maintenance Airmen in January 2025. The strategy called for enlisted Airmen to start out on a generalist track—a single Air Force Specialty Code—where they will focus on applying the most common maintenance skills such as recovering and fueling across multiple airframes. Once Airmen reach the rank of Senior Airman and are preparing to become noncommissioned officers, they would become a specialist in one of six non-aircraft-specific areas: 

Avionics and Electrical, which combines avionics with the electrical side of the Environmental and Electrical (E&E) specialty
Aerospace Ground Equipment, which will look the same as it does now
Advanced Mechanical, which combines crew chiefs, fuels, hydraulics, and the flight line side of engine maintenance
Crew Support Systems, which combines ejection seat systems with the environmental side of E&E
Fabrication, which combines aircraft structural maintenance, aircraft metals technology, and nondestructive inspection.
Intermediate-level engines, for maintainers dedicated to intermediate-level engine maintenance.

The New Plan

In the revised plan, the initial phase is similar. It will train maintainers entering the Air Force as aviation maintenance technicians, or AMTs, for their first 18 months of service, focusing on maintenance fundamentals for multiple airframes. The initial phase will also emphasize that the skills they are learning will ground them in the importance of aircraft sortie generation, which is a key focus of the service’s strategy to generate and sustain airpower even if under attack, Bell said.

“We’re an Air Force. We fly, fix, fight, and win. And the first thing that we want to be able to do is make sure that as all of our maintainers come in, they understand what sortie generation is about,” Bell said. “If you can’t get the aircraft off the ground, then what are we really here for?”

Maintenance Airmen will then transition into a specialty track where they will select from one of 14 different specialties, Bell said. The Air Force would not release the new specialty list because it is still refining how it will be organized, according to an Air Force spokesperson. There will be six specialties that are “aircraft-agnostic,” but it’s unclear how they will be different from the original six, the spokesperson said. Another eight specialties will be split among three different aircraft groups:

Fighter/Atack
Mobility/Strike
Tactical Lift/Rotary

Air Force officials refined the plan to offer more specialties after meeting with maintenance Airmen as part of the effort’s feedback-gathering campaign that began in January.

“We stood up 10 different working groups; we brought in almost 280 different maintainers from across the Air Force to help us refine the strategy and the specifics,” Bell said. “It was long list of things that we went through.”

The revised plan offers maintenance Airmen the option to change their specialty, which is currently based on their score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test that the majority of enlisted Airmen take while still in high school, Bell said.

“How well they did on that ASVAB test could probably determine what career field they went into and where they were going to spend the next 20 years of their life; something just doesn’t sit right about that,” Bell said. “And if we have the ability to now say, hey, ‘this may be where you scored and which you what you were selected for, but maybe now with a little more maturity, and now that we have shown you some other things, maybe there’s a different path still within the aircraft maintenance career field … maybe you want to choose this specialty over another.’ So, I’m really excited about that aspect of it. There is a little more optionality that also matches up with Air Force needs.”

Eventually, maintainers in the specialty track will have the opportunity to apply for the master aviation technician, or MAT, track—a more specialized pipeline designed to create a smaller force of highly skilled maintainers who will focus on fixing more complex problems on specific aircraft, Bell said.

 But the highly selective pipeline is only designed for a “small percentage of maintenance force; that’s going to cultivate them into cross-functional technical experts on a specific aircraft.”

“That small percentage of folks will help us ensure that as people move around, that MAT group of folks will be that core group of folks that we lean on to be those very technical experts to solve some of the hard breaks, the hard problems that might go on the aircraft,” Bell said.

When it was first revealed, the new strategy sparked concerns among current and former Air Force maintainers that the new design could dilute expertise across the career field and reduce local leaders’ ability to solve complex maintenance problems.

“I’m not going to say that that is not a valid concern, but with any change, you’re going to have some amount of pushback to it,” Bell said, adding that that is why the service sought feedback from current maintainers.

“I take all input, and that’s the reason why we have asked the major commands to send me your brightest people who can represent you, who are going to be constructive disruptors,” Bell said.

“To the maintenance Airmen that said, ‘I’m a naysayer and I don’t believe you in this’: give me your input and then help us try to mitigate that,” Bell added. “We can’t continue to do what we’re doing now and think that we’re going to get a different result.”

Critics also question how the Air Force would switch to the new model amid a shortage in maintenance manning.

Bell said that a key benefit of the 2A career field transformation is it will instill in young maintainers the importance of aircraft sortie generation similar to the way Air Force is stressing “airmindedness” in Basic Military Training and tech school to ensure Airmen understand they have a role in generating combat airpower.

“This particular line of effort that we’re doing right now with the two-way career field strategy speaks to retention because we believe that as more maintainers come in and then we train them up in this way, this ability to be sortie generators up front is going to add to their motivation and their reason for being,” Bell said.

“People want to add value, and their ability to be sortie generators early will show that they can add value—that’s why this two-way career field strategy, I believe, is going to be a benefit for us in the retention area.”