>>2027091My father and grandfather did aircraft assembly (and one of them also did on-site, international maintenance support for a few years before I was born).
The big thing we had to live with growing up was that the industry was cyclical on about a 12-year cycle. Father had two LOOOONG layoffs growing up, before he got enough seniority to ignore the market fluctuations. Now, maybe that was specific to manufacturing, but even in maintenance you'd have to deal with a sudden spike in experienced and desperate technicians looking for work.
They also both stole a bunch of materials, lol. We had so much homemade shit hacked out from aluminium. But I think the golden days of that are gone with modern inventory management. Towards the end my father was more likely to bring home obsolete computer parts than scrap.
