AB vs AO
Aviation Boatswain's Mate (USN) vs Aviation Ordnanceman (USN)
Two Sailors walk into liberty port. One's been staring at a radar. The other's been wrestling an engine. Both need a beer with equal desperation.
One recruiter swore you'd work on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The other promised you'd handle, inspect. Both maintained eye contact throughout. The AB quickly discovers: jet blast, spinning propellers, arresting cables under tension, and aircraft moving in every direction — all on a pitching deck in the middle of the ocean. In a parallel enlistment: The AO, meanwhile: the safety culture is genuine and real — because a mistake in your rate has a blast radius. Same military installation, different buildings, different problems, different definitions of "busy."
After the Uniform
The part the recruiter skips: what each job actually translates to once you're a civilian — and what it pays.
Salary data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. A guide, not a guarantee.
Recruiter vs. Reality
The pitch versus what people who actually did the job report back.
“You'll work on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier — one of the most dangerous and adrenaline-fueled workplaces on earth. ABs launch and recover fighter jets, manage jet fuel operations, and direct aircraft weighing 60,000+ pounds in spaces tighter than a parking lot. It's the closest thing to a controlled disaster the Navy runs every day.”
The flight deck will try to kill you. Jet blast, spinning propellers, arresting cables under tension, and aircraft moving in every direction — all on a pitching deck in the middle of the ocean. The work is physically brutal, the hours are relentless during flight ops, and the safety stakes are absolute. One wrong step and you're a statistic. The ABs who thrive love the intensity and take genuine pride in the fact that nothing flies without them. The civilian airport and aviation fueling industry hires from this background, but nothing on the outside matches carrier flight ops.
“You'll handle, inspect, and load ordnance on Navy and Marine Corps aircraft — from 20mm cannon ammunition to AIM-120 AMRAAMs to JDAMs to Harpoon anti-ship missiles. This is some of the most technically precise and safety-critical work in naval aviation, because a loading error or improper fuzing on a weapons system is not a maintenance discrepancy. The weapons knowledge and the handling experience transfer to DoD civilian ordnance positions, defense contractor weapons sustainment roles, and federal law enforcement specialized units. The Navy will not let you do this job carelessly and you will be better at every subsequent job because of it.”
Your workspace is the weapons elevator, the bomb farm, and the flight deck, which means you will spend a significant portion of your career in spaces that are either freezing, sweltering, or actively trying to kill you with jet blast. You will build up GBU-32s and MK-84s, load AIM-120s and AIM-9Xs, and do it at a pace that would make a logistics coordinator weep. The safety culture is genuine and real — because a mistake in your rate has a blast radius. Not figuratively. The magazine spaces on a CVN are a claustrophobic steel underworld where the temperature and the stakes are both elevated. Working parties for ammunition onload during UNREP will test your cardiovascular system and your patience simultaneously. Nobody outside the Navy knows what you did. The clearance you hold is real. The explosive ordnance disposal pipeline is a path some AOs walk. More often, you leave with a security clearance, the absolute unshakeable calm of someone who has handled live weapons routinely, and a hiring manager who doesn't know what to do with any of that but feels good about you anyway.
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