Col. Amanda Sheets, commander
19th Maintenance Group
An Air Force maintenance officer with 30 years in service, Col. Amanda Sheets directs heavy maintenance, off-equipment maintenance and aerospace ground equipment support to Air Education and Training Command’s 14 C-130J aircraft and support equipment. She has served assignments from Louisiana to Iceland and from her native Ohio to her first assignment in Arkansas two years ago.
However, it was the bedside, not the maintenance hangar, that first caught her interest in military service as a teenager.
“I wanted to serve my country. I’ve had that feeling for a long time, since high school,” she said. “I originally wanted to go into the Army. However, I was interested in nursing at the time, and my aunt knew the head Army nurse and head Air Force nurse. She took me out to Washington, D.C., and we went to Andrews and Walter Reed [hospitals]. I just decided I liked the Air Force better.”
After a couple of years of nursing school convinced her that was not the path she wanted to follow, Sheets attended a shadowing day at an air base, where she took in various other specialties. She found maintenance interesting and despite being, in her words, “not mechanically inclined,” excelled on the strength of her leadership skills.
“Honestly, it’s more about overall management of maintenance; it’s not necessarily about turning the wrenches,” she said. “It’s the personnel side. It’s learning the management of generating aircraft and fixing them on time, and when I say generating aircraft, it’s getting them ready to fly. That entails ensuring we have all the right parts and pieces, the right manning, the right skill set and the right timing to do the jobs.”
Asked what best described her rise through the ranks, she said it was the willingness to learn and the ability to apply that knowledge.
“You start off not knowing, and you have to learn and absorb,” she said. “I think for me personally, the biggest thing that I’ve done is I know I’m not the smartest one in the room. There’s a lot of knowledge out there, and I learned how to take in the different perspectives and different inputs to formulate the overall plan.”
*Editor’s note: Sheets relinquished command in June. Col. Kevin Scholz is the new commander of the 19th Maintenance Group.
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