Aviation Support Equipment Technician

The job changes more between AS1 and CPOAS than at any other promotion in the rate. You went from LPO — the most senior petty officer in the work center — to LCPO, the Chief who runs the entire enlisted GSE maintenance work center and sits in the Chief's Mess as a full member of the command's senior enlisted leadership team. The anchors change everything: how the sailors address you, how the wardroom uses you, how the Maintenance Officer expects you to function at the daily brief, and how the goat locker evaluates your professional conduct and your deckplate credibility every single day. As LCPO of the aviation support equipment work center — or as a senior maintenance chief at a shore-based air station, an FRC intermediate maintenance facility, or a carrier air wing staff — you run 15-40 AS technicians and own the enlisted GSE execution from the tool crib up. You are no longer the person who performs and signs the maintenance. You are the person who ensures that the right people are performing and signing it correctly, and that the culture of the work center treats the NAVAIR technical manual as the non-negotiable standard rather than a reference document that gets consulted when something goes wrong. You write Chief-quality eEVALs for AS1s and AS2s — the evaluations that determine which sailors are ranked for the next AS1, CPOAS, and SCPOAS advancement slate. A Chief who cannot distinguish between EP and MP performance in an eEVAL, who writes identical generic bullets for every sailor, is a Chief who is damaging the advancement prospects of the sailors he is supposed to be developing. The action-result-impact standard at Chief level means work-center outcomes, command-level impacts, and pipeline productivity — not individual maintenance actions. The CPO Academy and CPO 365 process are where the Navy attempts to imprint what the Chief's Mess actually is: the backbone of the enlisted force, the bridge between the wardroom's intent and the deckplate's execution, the professional body that enforces the standards that the Navy's institutional culture depends on. Chiefs who approach CPO Season as a hazing exercise or a social transition miss the point entirely. The mess is a professional obligation with professional standards, and the CPOAS who does not understand that walks into the Maintenance Officer's daily brief as a Chief in title only. You will mentor AS1s toward the Chief board, AS2s toward commissioning programs or advanced NEC pipelines, and ASANs and AS3s toward the professionalism the flight line demands. The production output of your mentoring — who selected, who commissioned, who earned the advanced NEC, who is now the LPO in the next squadron — is what the senior chiefs and master chiefs in the rate use to evaluate whether a CPOAS is doing the job or just wearing the title. The post-Navy transition plan starts here. Not urgently, but consciously. The FAA A&P certificate pathway, airline ground operations management, airport GSE supervisor positions, NAVAIR defense contractor roles — the civilian aviation ground support market recruits from the AS rate's senior enlisted leadership tier. The Chief who retires at 20 with a plan already in motion is in a fundamentally different position than the Chief who retires at 20 and starts looking. Build the civilian credential piece while you are still in, not after you process the retirement paperwork.