2023 AMT 40 Under 40 Maintenance Professional: Eric Van Oeveren — Mechanic, Burgess Aircraft Management

Learning is what Eric Van Oeveren enjoys most about his career.

“Some days you're learning to work on different systems. We're a Part 135 charter operator, so every once in a while, we get a new airplane type. And the first time you go to work on anything on that, there's always a learning curve behind it. And we don't do a lot of real heavy maintenance, so a lot of it's kind of just general line maintenance, troubleshooting, so learning how everything works,” he said.

Van Oeveren originally saw himself as a pilot before deciding to make the change to maintenance.

“I was looking at being a pilot and went to a college doing an aviation preview event. I was touring their facility and was walking through the maintenance area and was looking at all the different cutaways and stuff that they had sitting out, and just really thought that it was cool and that'd be something fun to learn and get to work on,” he described.

As part of his work with Burgess Aircraft Management, Van Oeveren sits on the company safety committee as a full-time member.

“I asked Eric to become involved as the lead auditor for the maintenance operations in our company as we needed someone who would dig deep into monitoring SMS operations within the maintenance side of our company,” said Kenneth Evers, director of safety, Burgess Aircraft Management. “I could not have found anyone better to do this task. Eric has spent literally hundreds of hours researching industry best practice standards, IS-BAO requirements, FAA requirements, etc. and measuring our operations against those standards. When he discovers areas of improvement, he immediately addresses these, documents them, and records those findings in our safety program.”

And it’s the variety that each day brings that Van Oeveren said he looks forward to.

“Every day's something new. You really don't know what's going to come up most days. I may come in in the morning thinking I'm going to be working on an audit and I may end up changing a couple of tires and performing an inspection on an airplane. You never really know what it's going to be until it gets there,” he said.