Danika Meeks has been a stay-at-home mother for 13 years. Tuesday, she sat in the lobby at the Columbus Airbus facility awaiting a job interview with company supervisors.

The Caledonia resident was in the United States Air Force before she had the first of her three children. Now with a 13-year-old, a 5-year-old and a 4-month-old, and her husband in a lower-paying job than the family’s used to, she decided to apply with Airbus. She said she’s banking on her avionics background — she fixed glitches in air planes’ instrumentals and computer systems when she was in the Air Force — to help her land a position.

“I’ve been wanting to come back to work,” she said.

Meeks was one of 69 hopefuls, most of them from the Golden Triangle area, who attended Airbus’ job fair Tuesday afternoon. Applicants could register online and fill out pre-applications before coming to Airbus and interviewing with one or more supervisors about the open positions.

Airbus is an international company with nearly 25,000 employees all over the world — more than 200 of whom work at its only plant in Mississippi, located next to Golden Triangle Regional Airport. The Columbus location opened in 2006 and manufactures two-to-three Lakota Helicopters each month for the U.S. Army, as well as H125 aircraft.

Vice President of Industry Michael Spears said the company hopes to fill 40 full-time positions at the plant over the next three months.

“We moved aircraft completions here this year, which means we have brought the majority of our industrial activity to Mississippi,” he said. “We are what we call the industrial center of excellence. So we have work now and we need skilled people.”

In this case, Spears said, Airbus is specifically looking for employees with at least two to six years of experience in aviation and mechanics to be aircraft technicians, quality assurance inspectors and engineers.

“From an engineering perspective, we need aviation-related engineering,” he said. “We certainly are willing to talk to anyone in a technical engineering aspect and discuss what their background is and see how it would possibly fit our (positions).”

But the job fair attracted applicants whose background ranged from several years in the military, such as Meeks, to recent graduates from certificate programs at East Mississippi Community College. Many, like Camp Pittman of Columbus, heard about the job fair from friends already working at Airbus and who recommended the facility as a great place to work.

“I have a couple of friends that work up here,” Pittman said. “They told me a couple of days ago I should show up, see what happens.”

Pittman applied for aircraft technician jobs. He said he worked for Stark Aerospace for two years up until a couple of weeks ago, which has given him the experience Airbus is looking for.

“I like the hours,” he said. “(My friends) enjoy working up here. I’m just trying to find a place where I can make a career out of, plain and simple.”

Derrick Covington, of Crawford, said he’d heard the same thing.

“I heard when you come here, they give you the opportunity to move up and better yourself,” he said. “I wanted a piece of that.”

Covington was in the Army National Guard for four years. He left in 2012 and now works at a body shop in Crawford. In all that time, he said, he’s been a mechanic — though he admitted he’s never worked on air planes or helicopters.

“I always was fascinated with helicopters, ever since I was in the military,” he said. “I just wanted to branch out and see what it was like.”

He hopes, if he receives a job as a technician at Airbus, to build on the experience he already has.

Spears said the company’s next step is to choose the applicants who stood out for more interviews before filling the open positions.

“If our supervisors like them, probably there would be one more return visit to finalize things, and then they would be hired,” he said.

But speeding up the hiring process is only one benefit to recruiting potential employees through a job fair like Tuesday’s, he said.

“When you have (a job fair), first and foremost, it adds excitement to the hiring for the employee,” Spears said. “They’re part of a group that’s coming in. It shows that your company is intense about hiring people, hiring people with skills.”

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