Aerospace welding is a highly specialized and niche skill in the field of welding. It is sometimes referred to as structural welding and involves the welding undertaken when building commercial or military aircraft, or even spacecrafts. 

If you’re a skilled welder, upscaling yourself into becoming an aerospace welder could be an advantageous career path. This role is responsible for fabricating metallic components, structures, and spaceflight hardware. Aerospace or aviation welders are top-notch welders that enjoy high pay grades and work with aerospace technology in companies like airlines, aero engineering, NASA, and private spacecraft companies like SpaceX.    

Its salary level is comparable with other specialized welding jobs like rig welding, underwater welding, pipeline welding, and nuclear welding, with around $100,000 per year. 

So how does one become an aerospace welder?

Carving a Career Path in Aerospace Welding

Like any high-skill level job, becoming an aerospace welder requires a degree of mastery and formal education to qualify for the job.

First, you have to have a highschool diploma and pursue higher education in welding or mechanical engineering, pass the exam to get a license, gain experience through apprenticeships or working in related industries, and get certified as an aerospace welder. Some companies offer programs to qualified applicants. 

The main skill requirement is proficiency and at least 3 years of experience with GTAW working on various relevant materials. These materials include stainless steel, carbon steel, aluminum, titanium, and inconel, among others. 

Required Skills

Aerospace welding requires a high level of precision to ensure clean, high quality welds. Because the aircraft’s very structural integrity is hinged on the weld work, nothing short of perfection is the norm. 

Fusing tiny materials, creating high temperature welds, ensuring clean welds, documenting the production, and welding based on meticulous specifications require a high level of skills and extensive experience.

Aerospace welders are required to be proficient in Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW) or Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welding, Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) or Metal Inert Gas (MIG), and Plasma Arc Welding (PAW). They also sometimes use low amperages for greater precision and control like micro MIG, micro TIG, and micro PAW.  

Other skills required for aerospace welding include blueprint literacy, numerical skills, cutting, grinding, and fabricating, and operating semi-automatic tools. As aerospace welding entails manual, analytical, and documentation work, it involves a lot of paperwork and dealing with numerical and technical specifications. 

Upskill With nexAir KnowHow

At nexAir, we pride ourselves on our KnowHow. Using this unique expertise, we provide applied industry knowledge training and seminars to your team, allowing them to upgrade their skill set. We proactively work with you to equip your people with the most advanced techniques in order to improve your company’s operational efficiency, profit margins, and growth capacity.

By providing continuous education and upskilling among welding professionals to ensure they are ready for the evolving landscape of welding work, we are helping them ForgeForward. Being more than a product supplier is what sets us apart. We partner with you and invest our technical knowledge and expertise in your growth story. Because that is what ForgeForward is all about: Enabling your success.