EXPOSED
The modal aerospace engineer spends most of the day in CAD, CFD/FEA setup and post-processing, trade studies, requirements documents, and test-report writing — all work AI is rapidly compressing, especially parametric sweeps and boilerplate certification paperwork. What holds is physical test and integration (wind tunnel, hardware-in-the-loop, flight test), and above all accountability for airworthiness and safety-of-flight decisions where a wrong call kills people. Licensure is a weak moat because the industrial exemption means most aerospace engineers never stamp anything, though FAA DER/ODA delegated sign-off authority is a genuine and narrower shield.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $116,500 → $134,960 -7.3% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+6.1% 71,600 → 75,900 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +6.1% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 48/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~4,500 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
EngineerDynamicistTest AnalystTest EngineerAerodynamicistDesign AnalystField EngineerFlight AnalystSpace EngineerStress AnalystValue EngineerDesign EngineerFlight EngineerStress EngineerSystem EngineerWeight EngineerRocket ScientistService EngineerThermodynamicistAircraft DesignerAircraft EngineerAirplane DesignerAirplane EngineerAviation Engineer
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: trust premium .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Parametric CAD updates, meshing, CFD/FEA run setup, load-case sweeps, mass-properties bookkeeping and DO-178C/ARP4754 traceability matrices are already being generated or auto-populated by tools, while anomaly resolution during integration, wind-tunnel and flight-test campaigns, and structural test correlation still require an engineer physically reasoning against unexpected data — that split of roughly two-thirds compressible desk output to one-third stubborn empirical work lands it at 11, not in the resistant band.
Some physical or field component A 7 reflects that the job is fundamentally screen-based — most weeks never leave the desk — but includes recurring hangar, cleanroom, static-test-rig and tunnel time, walking hardware with technicians during first-article inspection or chasing a fastener interference on the assembly floor, which is more physical presence than a systems analyst and far less than the A&P mechanic doing the actual torqueing.
Certification preferred, not legally required An 8 is set by the industrial exemption: Boeing, Lockheed and SpaceX engineers overwhelmingly hold no PE and their names never appear on a stamped drawing, with liability sitting on the company's type certificate — the points come only from the minority holding FAA DER, ODA unit member, or Authorized Representative status where a signed 8110-3 is personally attributable.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls 15 is earned by calls with no procedural answer: signing off a fatigue life extension on a spar, accepting a nonconformance as use-as-is, judging whether a failed acceptance vibration test invalidates the unit, or being the engineer who says the margin is adequate to fly — decisions where the failure mode is fatalities and the record of that judgment is read out in an NTSB or mishap board.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (11/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (8/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (15/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 30 of this occupation's 48 points (63%).
Embodiment (7/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to aerospace engineers on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 66/100, still EXPOSED.
Genuine two-tier job: if parametric CFD/FEA sweeps, CAD detailing, and cert-paperwork drafting are automated, residual work concentrates in requirements derivation, failure-mode reasoning on novel configurations, anomaly resolution in flight test, and defending analysis to an FAA/EASA authority — tasks that resist without any legal change.
FAA expanding and formalizing personal-accountability sign-off for AI-generated compliance artifacts: e.g. an FAA policy/AC under the ODA program requiring a named DER or ODA unit member to personally attest that any AI-produced certification data, stress reports, or MOC findings were independently verified. Precedent exists in post-737MAX Aircraft Certification Reform (ACSAA 2020) tightening ODA oversight and in EASA's AI Roadmap 2.0 'Level 2 AI' human-authority requirements.
Shift of headcount toward test-and-integration roles as design hours compress: wind tunnel campaigns, HIL benches, ground vibration test, flight test instrumentation and on-console anomaly calls. Rising launch and eVTOL flight-test cadence (FAA type certification programs at Joby/Archer) increases the share of the occupation physically present at hardware.
Certification frameworks that name an individual as accountable for AI-assisted safety cases — EASA's proposed requirement for a human 'final authority' on Level 2 AI applications, or an ODA procedures manual amendment assigning a specific engineer accountability for AI-derived means of compliance.
Narrowing of the state industrial exemption for safety-critical design, or DoD/NASA contract clauses requiring a licensed PE or named responsible engineer of record on structural/flight-safety analyses — analogous to NASA's Technical Authority chain being written into procurement as a personally-named liability role.
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route: the buyer is an OEM, airline, or government program office purchasing a certified artifact, not a named engineer's judgment; nobody pays extra for human-authored stress reports. Even with strong liability and accountability gains, the ceiling is bounded because the industrial exemption keeps most of the occupation unstamped and headcount tracks program starts, not per-engineer defensibility.
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 5,480 | $163,580 +21% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 5,200 | $163,280 +21% |
| Huntsville, AL | 4,880 | $131,090 -3% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 3,430 | $134,570 +0% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 2,420 | $166,420 +23% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 2,010 | $156,190 +16% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 1,890 | $133,970 -1% |
| Tucson, AZ | 1,720 | $106,760 -21% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 510 | $191,260 +42% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 930 | $181,630 +35% |
| Boulder, CO | 800 | $167,160 +24% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 48. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.