EXPOSED
The work is physically real — crawling into wing boxes and fuselage barrels to drill and rivet, shimming panels to tolerance, routing and tensioning control cables, torquing fasteners in tight spaces — and none of that is touched by language AI. The exposure is capital robotics and process engineering: automated fastening cells, drill-and-fill machines, and determinant assembly are already displacing manual riveting on high-rate programs, and the aerospace primes have strong incentives to keep pushing. There is no personal licensure protecting the assembler (unlike A&P mechanics), so the moat is skill and physical access, not law.
This fall is concentrated in 2020 and has not recovered since.
Median pay $54,210 → $65,380 -3.5% 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
-14.5% 33,600 → 28,700 on the projections basis
Shrinking, but not obviously because of AI
The BLS projects -14.5% by 2034, but at 48/100 this work is only moderately exposed — not the profile of a job current AI can simply do. Occupations shrink for many reasons, and the score does not point at automation as this one's cause.
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.
~2,800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
AssemblerInstallerShroudmanBody LinerBody JoinerBody WorkerRib BuilderSkin FitterTab BuilderMetal BonderMetal FitterWing CovererSpar FinisherConduit BenderSkin InstallerFuselage FramerHarness BuilderLight AssemblerTruss AssemblerAircraft RiveterAssembly RiveterManifold BuilderShield InstallerTubing Assembler
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Fitting a wing panel that arrives out of nominal, hand-shimming to a 0.005-inch gap, back-drilling in a crawl space where no gantry can reach, and running control cable through a fuselage with a fish tape are still manual on most rates — the 15 rather than 18 reflects that panel drilling and fastening on high-rate narrowbody lines has already moved to automated drill-and-fill cells.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You work inside the structure, not beside it: overhead riveting with a bucking bar, entering wing boxes and tail cones through access holes, kneeling in fuselage barrels, climbing platforms and jigs — but it's a lit, floor-controlled factory bay rather than a flight line in weather, which keeps it at 17 and not 20.
Certification preferred, not legally required No FAA certificate attaches to you — A&P mechanics own the release, DER and inspection stamps carry the sign-off, and your work is captured by QA buy-off, tool-crib torque calibration and traveller stamps, so the 5 instead of 0 reflects employer-issued qualifications on specific processes (sealing, torque, cable swaging, NDT-adjacent) that a hire must retest into.
Meaningful discretion You call whether a hole is oversize enough to warrant an oversize fastener, whether a gap needs a shim or a squawk to liaison engineering, and whether a sealant fillet passes — real calls with FOD and fatigue consequences — but the drawing, the process spec and the shop traveller define the acceptable answers, and anything ambiguous escalates to liaison engineering, which caps it near 8.
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 (15/20 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 (5/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (3/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (8/20) 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 16 of this occupation's 48 points (33%).
Embodiment (17/20) 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.
Sheet Metal Workers SAFE
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 67/100 — SAFE.
Nadcap/AS9100 or prime-customer flowdown requiring documented individual operator certification for special processes now common in composite and interference-fit fastening (hole prep, sealant wet-install, cold-work, torque-critical joints), with certification suspendable per person on escape. This exists today for welding and NDT operators; extending the same per-person certification regime to structural fastening would create a credential a robot cell cannot hold.
Task-mix shift as automated drill-and-fill takes the flat, high-access, high-rate panel work: what remains is closeout structure inside wing boxes and pressure bulkheads, one-off rework of robot-drilled holes out of tolerance, oversize/repair fastener installation, control-cable routing and tensioning, and low-rate or defense/derivative programs where the capital case for a fastening cell never closes. The occupation genuinely has these two tiers, and the residual tier is the one capital robotics has repeatedly failed at — Boeing's abandonment of its 777X fuselage automated riveting system (FAUB) and reversion to hand and flex-track work is the documented precedent.
Post-MAX/door-plug regulatory tightening that pushes stamp authority down to the assembler: an FAA rule or Boeing/Spirit corrective action plan requiring a named, individually certificated person (A&P or FAA-delegated ODA/designated inspector) to sign each fastener-installation and rigging buyback rather than a supervisor sampling records. The FAA's 2024 production certificate audits and the mandated Boeing Safety and Quality Plan already push traceable individual sign-off on structures work; if that hardens into named-holder certification for structural fastening and control-cable rigging, the assembler's signature becomes personally attributable.
Formal authority to disposition nonconformances at the point of build — assembler-initiated squawks, gap/shim measurement calls, and stop-build authority written into the quality manual as an individual right rather than routed to Manufacturing Engineering. IAM District 751 and SPEEA have both pressed stop-work and quality-escalation language after the 2024 door plug; if a contract or FAA-accepted quality plan makes the assembler the accountable party for accepting a mismatch condition, the ambiguity call sits with the human.
Only rises if program mix moves toward structures that resist automated access — additional composite one-piece barrels with hand-laid closeouts, or heavy defense/rotorcraft and MRO-adjacent buildup where fixturing is nonrecurring. This is a mix effect, not a change in the work itself, and the headroom is small since the score is already near ceiling.
The limit. No route to trust_premium: the buyer is an airline or the DoD purchasing a certified airframe, and nobody pays extra to know a human held the rivet gun — assurance is bought through the type/production certificate, not the hand. Note also that liability_shield and judgment_accountability gains would land on a smaller headcount: the same quality regime that makes each signature personally accountable also strengthens the primes' case for automated, self-documenting fastening cells on the work that can be automated. A higher register score here means a more defensible remaining job, not more jobs.
| Wichita, KS | 9,460 | $59,850 -8% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 4,010 | $110,470 +69% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 2,450 | $86,520 +32% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 1,570 | $65,000 -1% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 630 | $60,610 -7% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 600 | $79,850 +22% |
| Tucson, AZ | 580 | $73,930 +13% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 550 | — |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 4,010 | $110,470 +69% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 90 | $97,340 +49% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 2,450 | $86,520 +32% |
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.