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A study in modesty, Patrick Davis compared his old job with his new one with a good-natured shrug.

"I dealt with a lot of wires there, and I deal with a lot of wires here," he explained.

Davis let the thought drift away with a smile. Because, of course, the numbers point directly to the yawning difference between the vehicle he worked on for 14 years and the one he assembles now.

Then, the Ford Explorer: List price, $31,600; top speed, 120 (give or take a few miles per hour); capacity, one driver, five school-aged soccer players, five bags of Doritos, four cartons of juice boxes.

Now, the F-18 Super Hornet: List price, $53.8 million; top speed, Mach 1.8 (give or take a sound barrier); capacity, 11 portals for smart weapons, laser-guided bombs and "full spectrum mix" of air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance.

Each time he clocks in for the afternoon shift at the sprawling Boeing complex adjacent to Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, Davis punches yet another hole in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation about "no second acts in American lives."

In high school, he envisioned moving on to the U.S. Marine Corps.

Instead, Davis kicked around from job to job before landing at Ford’s Hazelwood assembly plant at the age of 23, a livelihood that provided well for his wife and three children right up to the day Ford shuttered the facility in 2006.

After that, he enrolled at the University of Phoenix, a first tentative move toward a career in information technology. Davis all but forgot about the competency tests he and other Ford workers took prior to leaving Ford.

Until, that is, he got a letter from Boeing gauging his interest in re-inventing himself to build jets.

Something in those test results caught Boeing’s eye.

As the company moves toward replacing an older work force inching toward retirement, "We’re looking for people with a basic aptitude in math, data research and teamwork," said Alan Carter, the company’s senior manager for production operations training. "We no longer ask people to check their brains at the door when they walk into the factory. We need people who can solve problems."

Boeing administered two more tests to Davis. Again, they liked the results.

Enough so that Davis was formally invited to join an intensive, state-supported program at St online cash advance. Louis Community College to help him make the transition from building a sports utility vehicle to building a jet fighter.

Constructing an aircraft, Carter says with classic understatement, "is a little more exacting than putting a car together."

Still, the basic skill sets — ease around tools, understanding how parts fit together — are similar.

And in this economy, the experts advise, it’s the unemployed willing to rechannel existing talents to fit a new job — rather than the other way around — who will land on their feet.

Davis took the first step by acknowledging his skills were transferable to another trade and an even bigger step when he agreed to spend six weeks, without pay, to retrain under the auspices of Carter and other Boeing officials.

A jack of all trades at Ford, Davis’ six weeks on SLCC’s Florissant Valley campus broadened his repertoire to include sheet metal work, hydraulics and riveting to supplement the electrical expertise he’d picked up in the auto factory.

Over a year ago, Davis reported for duty at the kind of factory little boys dream of.

He’s still in awe.

Underscoring Carter’s point, he saw right away there’s no room for error in a job that, as a bonus, restored his goal of one day serving his country.

"When you work on a plane, it has to be perfect," he pointed out. "Because you can’t pull it over and fix it on the side of a highway."

Sometimes, Davis ventures outside to observe as Boeing test pilots put the fruit of his labors through the paces.

"It makes you feel really good to be part of that," he says.

Even as he watches an F-18 partially of his making shoot straight into the clouds, Davis remains completely grounded — in every sense of the word.

At the age of 40, he’s climbed aboard an airplane exactly once, more than 20 years ago. Unlike his transition from earthbound vehicles to supersonic transport, the flight was bumpy.

And though he now knows more than most about what is required to get from earth to sky, it’s a trip he’s not particularly anxious to take again.
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