London Free Press Showcases Sky Harbour Aircraft in Feature

Sky Harbour fires back after surviving industry’s bumpy ride

Mon, July 27, 2009

By Pat Currie, Special to Sun Media

Goderich – Like a lot of small aviation companies, Sky Harbour Aircraft was flying along quite nicely until three high-salaried executives representing the Detroit Three automakers decided last November to take their corporate jets to Washington to beg for an extra $25 billion in bailout money from American taxpayers.

The timing and the imagery couldn’t have been worse. But the sky didn’t fall on the bumbling auto executives — it fell on small aviation companies like Sky Harbour, which earns its daily bread refurbishing and refinishing small business and executive jet aircraft and helicopters.

Representative Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York, underlined the “delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses.

“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo.”

Commentators and columnists were quick to ask why Alan Mulally of Ford, Robert Nardelli of Chrysler and Richard Wagoner of GM hadn’t taken any of the 24 daily nonstop commercial flights from Detroit to the Washington area, or even jet-pooled.

“They didn’t even try to justify their use of their corporate jets,” says Sandy Wellman, owner and president of Sky Harbour Aircraft, tucked up on the north side of the Goderich, far off the well-beaten power alley between Detroit and Washington.

“They have caused untold damage to our industry,” Wellman says. What’s more, the whole industry, including Sky Harbour, had already “taken a hit” at the same time from the onrushing recession. Now, with corporations paring back aviation budgets and masses of executive aircraft sporting “for sale” signs at fire-sale prices, smaller companies like Sky Harbour are “hanging in there,” says Wellman’s wife, Martina, who is customer service manager for her husband’s company.

In the U.S., the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) reported in April that corporate jet travel is down 25% since December 2007. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported that since 2005, air taxi operations fell 18% nationwide, while general aviation operations dropped 30%

Also stateside, the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) and General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) are fighting back against what they view as a knee-jerk reaction against business travel that seemed based entirely on an image of corporate excess.

The NBAA and GAMA resuscitated a 1993 No Plane No Gain campaign to trumpet the $150-million-a-year business aviation and small aviation companies make to the overall American aviation industry, often serving areas shunned by airlines.

Because business travellers can continue working while airborne, the NBAA says companies that use private aircraft return more to their shareholders than companies that don’t. The aviation industry believes that large corporations are being pressured to shun the use of private jets. Some dumped their jets at losses of millions of dollars.

Even firms that took no bailout money are slashing their aviation programs because they fear being targeted by politicians and the media, John Meehan, general manager of Landmark Aviation at Washington Dulles airport, told National Public Radio.

This is producing a bit of a bumpy ride for Sky Habour, which had been averaging sales of about $5 million a year for the last several years under the ownership of former Londoner Wellman.

An accountant, Wellman had been brought in more than 20 years ago to try to save what was a foundering air-charter company that had started out in the early 1950s under the Sky Harbour name, but had gone through a succession of owners and had been renamed Business Air Services.

Wellman couldn’t save it, but he bought it — for the proverbial dollar — in 1988 and over the last two decades had built it into a busy enterprise, refurbishing and repainting commercial aircraft for customers from all over the world and winning loads of trophies (and more contracts) for its work on restoring and refinishing warbirds — military aircraft from the Second World War.

Now Sky Harbour Aircraft has about 80 employees and a collection of five buildings — including a couple of roomy hangars, a number of large workshops and a huge “paint booth.”

One building dates back to the days when there were 50 structures there and the Goderich airport was a Second World War training base, part of a vast training organization that sprawled across the entire country and turned out 135,000 flyers and 200,000 ground crew, from all parts of the British Commonwealth.

The buzz and flutter of Fort Erie-built Fleet Finch elementary trainers faded into silence at Sky Harbour decades ago, but some of the little biplane’s more robust wartime successor’s still drop in regularly.

This suits the Wellmans right down to the ground — or, more accurately, right up from the ground — because both are unabashed fans of flight and aircraft, especially warbirds.

While work on sleek commercial and executive jets and modern helicopters is the bread-and-butter of Sky Harbour’s business, there’s no doubt that the chance to work on legendary kites is the cake and icing too for the Wellmans.

Many of the old warplanes often come with an unusual story attached, and sometimes one thread of the story leads into yet another unexpected scene in the wartime tapestry.

Take, for example, the F4F Wildcat that, in 1995, Sky Harbour painted in the colours and squadron markings of the kite piloted by U.S. navy Lt. Edward (Butch) O’Hare when he was credited with shooting down five Japanese bombers in a few minutes in 1942. Chicago’s sprawling O’Hare Airport is named in his honour.

The stubby F4F painted by Sky Harbour had skidded off the paddle-wheel aircraft carrier USS Sable in 1943 and spent 48 years under 60 metres of chilly Lake Michigan water before being rescued, restored and finally repainted (in trophy-winning fashion) in Goderich.

Converted from paddle-wheeler excursion steamers, the USS Sable and its sister USS Wolverine trained 17,260 American navy and marine pilots including former U.S. president George Bush. About 300 aircraft of various types wound up in the lake before the war ended, and 35 have since been recovered. Remarkably well preserved by the cold lake water, most have gone to museums.

Which leads the yarn around to the latest warbird to arrive at Sky Harbour, a TBM Avenger torpedo bomber of the type being flown by Bush when he was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire in 1944.

Big, powerful and unlovely, like most products of “the Grumman Iron Works,” the Avenger was the heaviest aircraft to operate off aircraft carriers during the Second World War. The TBM designation indicates the Grumman-designed torpedo bomber was built by General Motors.

Avengers fought in almost every major naval action in the Pacific during the war and dozens found postwar work in such areas as forestry (as aerial sprayers and water bombers).

“Oh, it’s just too crazy,” says Martina. “We’ve have Mustangs through here about 50 times, several for the second or third time. We’ve done a couple of (Vought F4U) Corsairs and a Hawker Sea Fury.

“A couple of years ago, at the Gathering of Mustang Legends in Columbus, Ohio, there were 82 P-51s there, and we had painted 16 of them.”

The walls in Sky Harbour’s offices are crowded with large photos of warbirds that have received the Sky Harbour treatment.

Rarer warbirds, such as Spitfires, are now getting up into the $2-million price range, while Mustangs, which came along later, still exist in large number and can be had for as little as $20,000 US (though a new owner can expect to spend another $400,000 to make one airworthy.)

Martina won’t say how much a typical refurbishing job costs, but does allow that the full Sky Harbour treatment can cost “close to $200,000.”

The big TBM squatting massively in one hangar “is just in for a partial paint job,” Martina says. “The owner is in a hurry to get it back so he can play with it.”

And there are six other commercial/executive aircraft in Sky Harbour hangars in various stages of being stripped, repaired and refinished.

Ironically, a couple are special models that could stir feelings of corporate excess. One is a Cessna Citation, painted pearl grey with chrome leading edges on its wings and jet intakes.

“That grey paint is so hard to match, but I love ‘em,” says painter Glen Donaldson, referring to aircraft in general.

The other is a Falcon 900, belonging to an executive aircraft service from London.

One crew, in stocking feet, is installing new carpet and seats freshly rebuilt and upholstered in fine leather (the two pilot seats in the cockpit are finished in sheepskin). Wood panelling (tiger-grain maple, perhaps?) gleams alongside polished marble countertops and gold-plated fittings, from faucets and cupholders to seatbelt buckles.

However, Martina wants to talk green, not gold.

“We’re quite proud of our environmental record,” she says.

“We do a lot of paint stripping and have just bought a press that removes paint solids from the stripping chemical we use. It has reduced our haz-mat (hazardous-material) waste by about 98%. Just shipping it off for disposal used to be a huge expense for us.”