Leadership In Flight

Pioneering UNT grad becomes first female to earn top honor for achievements in commercial airline engineering

After nearly three decades of building a career rooted in top-tier aviation safety and reliability for millions of travelers at American Airlines, Stacy Morrissey (’21 M.B.A.) has been announced as the 2026 airline recipient of the Airlines for America Nuts & Bolts Award, which recognizes individuals who demonstrate outstanding service and achievements in engineering or maintenance in the commercial aviation industry.

Morrissey is the third woman to be honored with the award in its 60-year history and the first female recipient in the Airline category.

“It feels surreal because I’ve known people who have won this award before, and they’ve done monumental things,” Morrissey says. “To even have someone say my name in the same sentence is incredibly humbling and amazing.”

Morrissey began her career at American just a week after completing her bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University in 1998, hopping into a moving van and making her way to Fort Worth. Entering as a fleet operations engineer, she took calls from all over the world and helped fix airplanes.

She was soon promoted to director of quality assurance in 2014, and two years later, Morrissey was selected as managing director of base and strategic planning. In 2020, she was promoted to her current role as vice president of engineering and quality at American, leading a team of more than 1,400 and overseeing engineering, quality control, quality assurance, reliability and more.

“We get to design the interiors of what aircraft look like,” Morrissey said. “We get to pick what someone’s going to sit on and touch and feel. We get to build things that last, and we get to put people at weddings and funerals and all of those other reasons people travel. We get to do amazing things.”

 A few years after joining American, Morrissey decided to take the next step in her career and enrolled in the M.B.A. program at the University of North Texas.

“I started my M.B.A. in 2002 and then I probably set a world record of some sort, because I graduated 19 years later,” she says. “I got a full year in and felt like I was doing really well, and then I had my first child. At that time, I knew I could work and I could go to school, or I could work and I could be a mom, but I knew I couldn’t do all three at the level that I wanted to.”

Morrissey took multiple breaks between stints in graduate school while climbing the ranks in her career at American, and along the way she welcomed two more children.

“And then I did my kiddos’ homework for about 12 more years,” Morrissey says. “When my oldest child decided it was time to go look at universities, I took her to UNT. I walked on campus and I just thought, ‘I need to finish what I started.’”

And this time, she took her studies online.

“I was able to do it online while being a mom and working — and doing those things right. You can do life, you can do school and you can make them both work together.”

“I wanted the additional education to understand the fundamentals of our business,” Morrissey says. “I understand the operational side — I know how airplanes work from front to back — but understanding everything else that goes into running a business? That’s where the M.B.A. has come in the most handy to me.”

Morrissey says the most valuable takeaways from her program came from her courses in finance and accounting, which gave her an in-depth understanding of “the why” behind how the business works.

“My favorite is always going to be accounting,” she says. “I had taken some of those classes 20 years ago when I first started, and then some more classes more recently. So those stand out to me as my favorite and the most applicable to what I’m doing now.”

Now, as Morrissey receives her top honor, she reflects on previous leaders she’s worked for and how her strong leadership skills have developed over time.

“Leaders taught me best by throwing me into the deep end and making me figure something out because that was what I needed at the time,” Morrissey said.

Morrissey says the opportunity to mentor college students gaining side-by-side engineering experience at American is among the most rewarding experiences.

“We run a co-op program, and we have two tranches each year, so at any given point in time, we probably have about 20 students here at American, working alongside our engineers,” she says. “I give them two sets of advice — the first is to ask questions, be inquisitive and never stop learning. And two, say yes. Because opportunity will show up in all sorts of forms.”

But Morrissey says some of the most inspirational moments she’s experienced as a leader have come from her team members.

“The most inspirational things that you get as a leader come from your team members. Leadership is a journey, it’s not a destination,” she says. “You have to be open to learning things from anyone and everyone, and that includes the people that work for you. I believe in borrowing the very best practices from those who are doing awesome things.”