Prior to joining Piedmont Airlines, Michael Goudreau spent five years in the Marine Corps, working on F-18s as a structures and hydraulics mechanic.
“Fundamentally, it was anything that had to do with flight controls, landing gear, anything that hydraulics ran through as well as sheet metal repair, composite repair, that kind of stuff,” Goudreau described.
Once out of the Marines, Goudreau attempted to find a career in computer science, but discovered it wasn’t for him and turned back to aviation – receiving his A&P from the Aviation Institute of Maintenance in Manassas, Virginia, in 2020. He has been with Piedmont Airlines ever since.
Goudreau said his experience in the Marines led him to aviation.
“Through meeting people and being forced into the aviation side of things, which I kind of just took a stab in the dark. I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be for me but let me take a shot at it.’ I just was like, ‘Okay, this is something that I really, really love,” he recounts.
Today, Goudreau says what he enjoys most about his work is the flexibility it requires of him.
“It’s mostly line maintenance that I do down here. I really enjoy being able to see the planes that I fix out here on the line go and take off, as well as I just enjoy the fact that it’s not the same thing every day. Because I have worked in a hangar environment, and it kind of got to the same couple things, like, it was the same four or five things every day. So, it is nice, you’re walking in, you don’t know exactly what’s going on, and you just have to be flexible,” he said.
“I get to work with my hands and the fact that it’s a challenge,” Goudreau continued. “And I just enjoy rising to that challenge every time, as far as, since it’s a line maintenance aspect, it’s you don’t know what’s coming as far as, ‘Hey, there’s a plane that’s broken.’ As far as the way that we run it, we get calls from maintenance control. We’re kind of just an on call. ‘Hey, you got to go fix it’ and you just have to be ready and you got to be able to roll with it and diagnose the problem. So I kind of just look at it as a, not necessarily a game, but I enjoy the aspect of, I don’t know what’s coming, so I kind of have to be ready for everything and anything.”
