In order to make a well informed decision about your major and your future career, it is critical that you take a strong look at not only the qualifications required to work in the job and the pay associated with the position, but what a typical work day will entail for an aviation engineer, as well. After all, you will be working in the field for decades, so the job duties should be something that you find intriguing.

The job of an engineer working in the aviation industry will require a combination regular or very routine science and profound problem solving. Engineers, regardless of industry, are tasked with analyzing a problem and devising the best, safest and most cost effective means of countering that problem.

Aviation engineers work specifically with aircraft. That can mean everything from small flight vehicles to huge commercial airliners and cargo transports. They may also work with missiles, satellites and spacecraft projects, as all of these vehicles must be airworthy and capable of making it through the earth’s atmosphere in order to reach space, though space flight projects are usually the more intimate domain of aerospace jobs rather than aviation engineers.

Engineers in aviation spend their days working on new and existing aircraft designs. With existing designs, the engineer may be looking for ways to improve efficiency or performance. They may deal with specific systems or design problems and devise plans for correcting those issues.

They will put together complex text and graphics to aid in the building of prototypes to be tested. They oversee the construction of those prototypes and then put them through a series of rigorous safety, quality and stability tests.

Engineers collect the data from all of the tests performed and analyze it. They may make additional prototypes based on those findings and repeat the entire design, development, testing and analysis process several times before coming up with the final product which will be put into normal operations.

Aviation engineers who work on the development of new aircraft will utilize these same basic principles and processes in their daily work. Regardless of what kinds of projects an engineer may work on, he or she will spend a great deal of time in a laboratory setting and in the field when building and testing vehicles, systems and component parts of an aircraft.