Jeffrey Buzzell Director of Maintenance Signature TECHINCAir

Jeffrey Buzzell is the director of maintenance for St. Paul, MN-based Signature TECHNICAir. He grew up in Eagan, MN and has been involved in aircraft maintenance for 40 years. He has a family of A&P mechanics. His wife Janese and both of his sons are A&Ps. This is Buzzell’s story.

Uncle Bud

Buzzell says that his Uncle Bud, a pilot for Northwest Airlines, got him interested in aviation at an early age. “I always looked up to my Uncle Bud,” Buzzell says. “He was my favorite Uncle. I became interested in anything to do with airplanes because of him. I built and flew remote control airplanes. I was always fascinated with Uncle Bud the pilot. He spurred my interest in aviation.”

We asked Buzzell if he ever had any interest in becoming a pilot like his Uncle Bud. “No,” he says. “I was real handy – I was always fiddling with something. I found more enjoyment building model airplanes than flying them. I just never thought I wanted to be a pilot.”

U.S. Navy

Buzzell enlisted in the Navy after he graduated from high school. After boot camp, he became an AMH (hydraulics technician). He worked in a squadron that eventually de-commissioned. The last two years of his service, he was assigned to Fighter Squadron One (VF-1) at NAS Miramar in San Diego, CA that was the first F-14 squadron. He was assigned to AIMD, an intermediate maintenance department, working on all the hydraulic components of the aircraft. While assigned to the squadron, he did a Westpac Pacific cruise on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Buzzell served in the Navy from 1975-1979.

Education

After getting out of the Navy, Buzzell enrolled in Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN and earned an Associates of Arts degree. He then attended Minneapolis Community and Technical College, which had a Part 147 school, to obtain his A&P certificate.

The First Aircraft Maintenance Job

We asked Buzzell how the job search went after obtaining his A&P. “It was pretty easy – I had a job lined up before I had graduated,” he says. “One of the instructors at the school found me a job at Wright International Express. So I had a job ready for me when I graduated from school.”

Wright International Express was a Part 135 operation based in Cincinnati, OH. The company flew cancelled bank checks around the country with a fleet of Cessna 310s and Lear Jets. Buzzell was hired to work at the company’s maintenance base in Lakeville, MN.

Buzzell was the sole mechanic at the Wright International Express’ maintenance base in St. Paul. You could say he was the mechanic and the DOM all wrapped in one (along with customer service representative, quality assurance manager, parts manager and custodian). “I guess I was confident,” he says. “When I first started, I went to Cincinnati for three weeks of initial training. At first, I was based in Lakeville airport, next to Dagnon Aviation. We then moved to St. Paul airport next to Sanborn Aviation. Paul Dagnon, who owned Dagnon Aviation, and Paul Zemke, the director of maintenance at Sanborn Aviation, both went way out of their way to help me out. They were great mentors who took me under their wings and helped me through any problems I encountered. Those guys made all the difference in the world by helping me out.”

Aero One Charter

In 1988, the owner of Aero One Charter contacted Buzzell and offered him a job as DOM for the company. Buzzell accepted the job and once again found himself in a one-man shop. Aero One was a small charter company located at St. Paul airport. Buzzell worked there for a year before he got a call out of the blue from the president of Northland Community and Technical College in Thief River Falls, MN offering him a job as an instructor.

Teaching

While Buzzell was working at Aero One Charter, his wife Janese was teaching A&P classes at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. He ended up working at the College part-time teaching a one-night class on Preventative Maintenance for Pilots. He taught pilots about performing preventative maintenance on their aircraft, and he says it was a popular course.

At that same time, Northland Community and Technical College was growing in leaps and bounds. The president called Buzzell and asked him if he would move to Thief River Falls to teach at the college. “I told him about my wife who was teaching at the night program down here,” he says. “That put the whole ball in motion. The next thing you know, my wife and I were both interviewing at the school and we were both offered jobs teaching at the school.”

“Teaching at Northland Community and Technical College was the most enjoyable job I have ever had – hands down,” Buzzell tells D.O.M. magazine. “I taught mostly airframe subjects. I would teach a powerplant class every now and then based on scheduling.”

Buzzell worked at Northland from August 1989 until 1996, when he took a leave of absence to go work for Air Alpha in Denmark. He was a consultant on FAA requirements for Air Alpha. After six months, he returned to Northland and served as the schools director until 1999. During that time, his sons both attended the school and earned their A&Ps.

Moving Back to St. Paul

Buzzell and his wife enjoyed working at Northland. They also enjoyed their life in Thief River Falls. Well…for the most part. “We spent 10 years in Thief River Falls,” he says. “We had a beautiful hobby farm on the river. Our kids pretty much grew up there. It was a wonderful place to raise a family. But when you go from the big city to Thief River Falls and you deal with the winters for 10 years you start to think, ‘We need to get back to civilization.’ When we were up there, we broke every record for low temperatures. I remember one night when it got so cold that the propane quit gassing. Our furnace quit working on the coldest night in Minnesota because the propane wasn’t gassing. I called the propane guy and he actually told me, ‘Just build a fire under your propane tank!’ It was enjoyable up there, but I was miserable in the wintertime.”

Buzzell still had many business connections in Twin Cities, and he was asked to visit Regent Aviation, a Part 145 repair station, to discuss a job opportunity. He accepted a job as the director of maintenance at Regent Aviation in 1999 and moved back to St. Paul.

Signature TECHNICAir

In 2007, Signature Flight Support acquired Regent Aviation. The maintenance operation is Signature TECHNICAir. Buzzell has 19 employees in the shop. They work on a variety of aircraft including King Airs, Cessna Citations and Gulfstreams. Signature TECHNICAiris an authorized service center for Honeywell for TFE-731 engines. Buzzell also has a Level 3 NDT technician on staff who does NDT inspections for TECHNICAiras well as outside customers. A few years ago, the company acquired the assets of a maintenance shop at Minneapolis (MSP), and the company does a lot of drop-in maintenance at the MSP facility.

Training

With a wide variety of aircraft, we asked Buzzell if training is a challenge. “You can say it’s a challenge,” he says. “We’ve done both in-house and OEM training. We have just acquired some more space here, are we currently setting up a room with all of the equipment we need for training. That will make it easier on us. If we need some Gulfstream training, instead of having our guys go to Gulfstream, I can have an instructor come here and do the training at our facility.”

Finding New Employees

We asked Buzzell if it is difficult finding new employees. “Right now, it’s incredibly challenging,” he says. “Every mechanic who wants to work is working. There is no pool of A&P mechanics to choose from right now, and there’s going to be a severe shortage of them in the future. The only way you are going to find a mechanic with a substantial amount of experience is to hire them away from another company. What really helped us grow and get some good talent here is that General Dynamics had a Gulfstream facility in Minneapolis that they closed down around six years ago. We were able to get some well-trained mechanics with many years of experience at that time. We have four or five of those guys from that facility.”

Preventing Turnover  

If the only way to find a mechanic with experience is to hire them away from another company, we asked Buzzell how he keeps his employees from leaving, especially given the fact that many of his employees have extensive experience and training. “It’s challenging,” he says. “I believe we are a good place to work. We have a great reputation, and our guys pretty much stay here. I have been here 16 years, and we have a couple of guys that have been here longer than that. You need to treat your emloyees with respect if you want them to stick around.”

Advice

We asked Buzzell what advice he would give to someone looking to have a successful career in aircraft maintenance. “Learn as much as you can about everything involved in aviation,” he says. “You can take all the courses you want, but you also need to pay attention to the people who are the managers and directors of maintenance. You need to observe them and figure out what their best traits are and form your management style based on other people’s experience.”

“In this business, if you aren’t interested in learning, you aren’t going to go anywhere,” Buzzell continues. “You need to take it upon yourself to learn as much as you can. There are opportunities every day to learn something new. You have the choice of learning from or ignoring what is going on around you. The guys who ignore everything just continue to do what they do every day. The guys who pay attention and want to learn are the ones who move up the ranks.”

Buzzell’s wife and sons apparently believe in the same career philosophy. Janese received her PhD in Leadership and Organizational Development and is a dean at a University. Their son Barry is an inspector at the Cessna Citation Service Center in Milwaukee, and their other son Graeme lives in Seattle and works for Blue Origin, a company set up by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos that is developing a variety of space vehicles.

“I have around four years before left I retire – at least that’s my plan,” Buzzell told us as we wrapped up our conversation. “When I retire and look back on my career in aviation, I would like to think that my contribution to aviation was how I touched people and helped them just like the guys who went out of their way to help me when I first started out. I hope that I have touched a lot of people’s lives in a positive way.”