The technician gap is real — and technology is part of the answer

A new generation of startups is rethinking how the aviation industry trains, augments, and retains its most critical talent.

At the X, a series of industry insights from TechNexus Venture Collaborative, explores how innovation lives at the intersection of emerging technologies and legacy industries.

With tens of thousands of aircraft mechanics set to retire over the next decade, the aviation industry faces a workforce crisis that can’t be solved by hiring alone. A new generation of startups is rethinking how the industry trains, augments, and retains its most critical talent.

A Crisis Decades in the Making

The numbers are stark. North America is currently short approximately 17,000 certificated aircraft mechanics. Another 45,000 technicians are expected to retire over the next decade. The shortfall is projected to peak in 2028, when the deficit could reach as many as 30,000 mechanics.

This didn’t happen overnight. The September 11 attacks triggered years of airline hiring freezes, creating what analysts call a “lost generation” of mechanics. COVID-19 drove thousands more out of the industry. And the pipeline of military veterans who once fed the civilian workforce has thinned considerably. Today, the average age of a certificated A&P mechanic in the U.S. is 54.

“It really is a perfect storm,” Brian Prentice, a partner at Oliver Wyman’s transportation and operations practice, told CNN. “Aircraft are flying longer, demand for travel is high, and we’re losing experienced technicians at the same time.”

Meanwhile, the FAA issued 9,013 new mechanic certificates in 2024—the second-highest total on record, but still woefully insufficient against projected retirements and demand growth. Even today, roughly one-third of A&P training seats sit empty, a mismatch driven by attrition and faculty shortages at aviation maintenance schools.

The industry can’t just hire its way out of this crisis. It needs a complete rethink of how aviation maintenance is trained, delivered, and sustained.

Why Hiring Alone Won’t Fix It

The traditional response to a skills shortage—recruit more, train more, pay more—runs into hard structural limits. Aviation maintenance requires FAA-certificated technicians, a credentialing process that takes 18–30 months and depends on qualified instructors, physical facilities, and hands-on aircraft access. You can’t simply spin up capacity.

What the industry needs isn’t just more technicians. It needs to make each technician more capable, compress the path to competency, and capture the institutional knowledge that walks out the door every time a senior mechanic retires. That’s where technology enters the picture.

Across the TechNexus portfolio and the broader venture landscape, a compelling set of startups is attacking this problem from multiple angles—immersive training, intelligent work instructions, autonomous inspection, and smarter parts operations. Here’s what we’re watching.

Startups Closing the Gap

Augmenting the Technician in the Field

Scope AR (TechNexus Portfolio Company): Augmented Reality for MRO

Platforms like Scope AR's WorkLink are among the most relevant technologies emerging in the MRO workforce conversation. WorkLink delivers step-by-step, AR-guided work instructions overlaid directly onto the aircraft component in front of a technician—eliminating the need to cross-reference paper manuals, reducing cognitive load, and dramatically compressing the time it takes for a less-experienced technician to perform complex tasks.

In a recent time trial with FTAI Aviation, entry-level technicians using WorkLink for gas turbine engine inspection were significantly faster than technicians following standard procedures—without any prior familiarity with the process. The platform has demonstrated reductions in training and certification time of up to 90%, and companies that deploy AR-guided maintenance have reported over $1 million in annual travel savings by enabling on-site technicians to perform repairs that previously required flying in specialists.

The deeper value, however, is knowledge preservation. As senior technicians retire, their expertise doesn’t have to leave with them. WorkLink captures and codifies that knowledge into AR work instructions that any technician can access—transforming tacit expertise into a repeatable, scalable asset.

Autonomous Inspection: Freeing Technicians for Higher-Value Work

Mainblades (TechNexus Portfolio Company): AI-Powered Aircraft Inspection

A standard visual inspection of a widebody aircraft takes two to three engineers up to 12 hours. Mainblades’ fully autonomous drone software—equipped with AI-powered image analysis and LiDAR positioning—completes the same inspection in approximately two hours, with no pilot required and no GPS dependency.

The operational math is compelling: Mainblades estimates a resource cost reduction of over $8,800 per widebody inspection, with an operational gain (accounting for aircraft out-of-service time) exceeding $220,000. Lightning strike inspections, previously a time-intensive manual process, are completed 75% faster. These metrics reveal potentials for autonomous inspection systems to tackle the industry pain points regarding labor intensity, turnaround times, and aircraft availability.

The workforce implication is just as significant. By removing routine visual inspection from the technician workload, Mainblades frees certificated mechanics to focus on diagnosis, repair, and complex maintenance—the work that actually requires their credentials. Delta TechOps and KLM Engineering & Maintenance are among the major operators that have partnered with Mainblades to advance this capability. Boeing has now incorporated drone inspection into its 737 aircraft maintenance manual.

Rebuilding the Training Pipeline

DeepHow: (TechNexus Portfolio Company) AI-Powered Knowledge Capture and Training

DeepHow addresses perhaps the most elusive challenge in aviation maintenance: preserving the institutional knowledge of an aging workforce before it retires. Founded in 2018 by former Siemens innovation leaders, DeepHow’s AI platform turns expert know-how into structured, step-by-step video training content—automatically segmented, captioned, and translated into 50+ languages—that any technician can access from any site. Where Scope AR’s WorkLink codifies expertise into real-time AR overlays, DeepHow captures it on video first, transforming raw expert footage into a searchable, scalable training library that survives the expert’s departure.

The platform’s Smart Training suite, launched in 2025, adds AI-driven skills verification—allowing organizations not just to distribute training content but to confirm that technicians have mastered each task before advancing. Companies deploying DeepHow have reported 40% reductions in training time and training cost reductions of up to 10x. The platform is now deployed across hundreds of sites globally, with customers including Unilever and Energizer.

For an industry confronting mass retirements, the value proposition is straightforward. Every senior A&P mechanic who leaves without their knowledge being captured represents an irreversible loss of institutional capability. DeepHow provides the infrastructure to prevent that loss at scale—turning the tacit expertise of a shrinking veteran workforce into a reproducible, transferable asset that compounds in value as headcount grows.

Transfr (External Venture): VR-Based A&P Mechanic Training

One of the most acute constraints on growing the technician workforce is the cost and accessibility of training. Becoming a certificated A&P mechanic requires hands-on time with actual aircraft and specialized tooling—resources that are expensive to provide and geographically concentrated. Transfr is dismantling that constraint.

Transfr’s VR platform delivers FAA ACS-aligned aviation maintenance simulations that trainees can access without a hangar, runway, or specialized equipment. An AI-powered virtual coach provides one-on-one instruction, reducing dependence on qualified human instructors—one of the scarcest inputs in the training system. The simulations serve as a structured bridge between classroom instruction and live aircraft work, allowing students to build muscle memory and procedural fluency before they ever touch real equipment.

L3Harris, which has deployed similar XR training approaches, has reported a 20% reduction in maintenance training costs and a fourfold increase in student throughput. For schools struggling to fill training seats and for operators trying to stand up apprenticeship programs quickly, that kind of scalability is transformational.

Implications for aviation maintenance leaders

The emerging playbook for forward-thinking MRO operators combines three complementary strategies:

Augment existing technicians with AR-guided instructions that allow less-experienced staff to perform more complex work with greater accuracy and speed.

Automate inspection workflows using drones to remove low-value, time-intensive tasks from the technician workload and redeploy that capacity toward repair and diagnosis.

Rebuild the training pipeline through immersive simulation that reduces cost barriers, accelerates certification timelines, and widens the addressable talent pool.

None of these technologies replaces the A&P mechanic. But together, they change the fundamental equation—allowing a smaller, better-supported workforce to maintain more aircraft, with less downtime, at higher quality. In a world where the technician gap is only widening, that leverage is no longer a competitive advantage. It’s a business necessity.

The objective is not to replace apprenticeship—it’s to industrialize it. To make expertise reproducible, measurable, and less dependent on a shrinking cohort of senior technicians.

The TechNexus perspective on the MRO innovation landscape

At TechNexus, we sit at the intersection of the ventures building these solutions and the industry leaders who need to deploy them. What we see across our portfolio and deal flow is a cluster of genuinely mature, operationally proven technologies that are ready for enterprise adoption at scale—not a future bet, but a present-tense opportunity.

For aviation services organizations with large technician workforces, the near-term priorities are clear: evaluate AR-guided work instruction platforms that can be layered into existing MRO workflows; pilot drone inspection programs to quantify the labor and turnaround time savings in your specific operations; and engage with immersive training providers to assess whether your apprenticeship or onboarding programs can be accelerated and made more accessible.

The technician gap isn’t going away. But the tools to narrow it—and to build a more resilient, capable maintenance workforce around it—are here. The ultimate question remains: which organizations will deploy them effectively across the enterprise?

By Jim Dallke at TechNexus Venture Collaborative