American Airlines' Legendary Mechanic Dies at 100 After Record 80-Year Career
American Airlines' Legendary Mechanic Passes Away at 100 After 80-Year Career
Azriel "Al" Blackman, the Guinness World Record holder for the longest career as an airline mechanic, passed away on July 24 at age 100. He joined American Airlines' predecessor in 1942 at 16, working from Sikorsky flying boats to Boeing 777s. In 2017, American Airlines dedicated a Boeing 777-200 to him, and he continued working until 2022, completing 80 years of service.
"When you like what you do, it's not work."
- skinwill
A buddy of mine is the son of a United Airlines mechanic who was fairly high up in the organization. When his dad passed United gave him a stack of blank wax tickets. His son could write the destination on them and fly for free. Near the end of the stack they were largely ornamental as he could just tell them where he wanted to go and they would print a proper ticket. But still, it was a rather classy way to honor his father.
- embedding-shape
How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every single time.
- ak217
If you're interested in commercial aircraft and their maintenance process, check out Stig Shift on YouTube. He's another AA mechanic based in LAX, and makes interesting videos with some technical deep dives interspersed with planespotting.
- toomuchtodo
Azriel "Al" Blackman
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/us/azriel-al-blackman-dea... | https://archive.today/dmcaA
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/105781-lo...
- CodeWriter23
"just 50 cents per hour" which was 1.66x minimum wage at the time.
- andyst
Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
- TechSquidTV
Dear God, I hope he transferred that knowledge the best he could.
- rvz
Aviation Legend. RIP Azriel.