By IAN ROSS
Business partners Don McNabb and Julian Chin had originally planned to officially open the hangar doors on their aircraft inspection and repair shop in Sault Ste. Marie by early summer, but their clients couldn’t wait.
In March, the first Bombardier-made Q-400 turboprop had arrived at the new J D Aero Technical facility at Sault airport, followed shortly afterward by one of Porter Airlines’ new Q-400s scheduled for a fuel-burn analysis test.
The company is a fledgling entity launched by McNabb and Chin earlier this year to do maintenance, repair and overhaul work for the surging market in regional commuter aircraft.
It’s a offshoot of their original business, J D Aero Maintenance, and specializes in heavy maintenance checks, airframe and composite repair, and line maintenance on turbo-prop aircraft like the Canadair (CRJ) and Dash 8 series.
The Bombardier line is where McNabb’s and Chin’s years of experience reside as Transport Canada-licenced aircraft maintenance and flight test engineers. McNabb is the chief operating officer while Chin handles the CFO duties. Both worked for Bombardier for seven years and then went over to Field Aviation, Canada’s largest aircraft service company.
Last winter, they moved into a vacant 30,000-square-foot hangar, shop and office space once used by NorOntair.
Inside, they converted the administrative space into training and conference rooms, a sales department, a metal shop, and set aside extra office space and parts bins for their visiting clients.
The decision to set up shop in the Sault was a combination of the hangar being available and its relative proximity to their Toronto homes (about an hour’s flight time).
Renovations to the hangar was a half-million investment by the company but the airport corporaton also helped secure more than $400,000 from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund.
At the Sault, McNabb and Chin expect to perform 15 to 20 heavy maintenance checks per year.
Since opening last winter, the company put six locals to work full-time in maintenance, IT and accounting positions. Three Sault College part-timers were also working on sheet metal.
“We’re looking at another four to six people by summer and eventually over the next two or three years as we grow, we’re looking at 50 people here,” says McNabb.
The clients they hope to lure in are Canadian and U.S. regional airline operators.
“We’ve even talked with a couple of European airlines that are interested in bringing aircraft over,” says McNabb.
Regional carriers like Norway’s Wideroe ship their overflow work to a facility in Calgary.
The more competitive shop and currency conversation rates against the Euro works in Canadian repair shops’ favour.
The company’s short history began in 2003 with JD Aero Maintenance performing new aircraft maintenance and delivery inspection services for Bombardier, De Havilland, Brazil’s Embraer, plus other regional airlines round the world.
They send manpower around the world with contract technicians in Denver, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Luxembourg and Nigeria. They also handle third-party record-keeping and auditing on the maintenance of leased aircraft.
“It’s a very specialized job,” says Chin. “When you’re doing a lease-audit, not everyone has the ability to do it. You need the aircraft background.
“If you can have the skill level of auditing and understanding the aircraft, and know where to look for problematic issues on these returns, it benefits the bank when it comes to leased-returns.”
Depending on the type of aircraft, manufacturers’ specs usually call for a mandatory check every 5,000 hours of flight time. That can mean shop time of two weeks to one month per check.
“We have the capability to handle two to three aircraft at a time,” says McNabb.
The Sault hangar can handle a Boeing-737, but until the business really gets rolling, the company prefers to stay with their Dash 8 and CJR specialty.
“That’s our core business, it’s the regional turbo-prop families within the 30 to 70 seaters,” says Chin. “From there, things should rocket off and things could change in a hurry, but we’d like to start off with the business that we understand and know.”
Although with all the North’s surging mineral exploration activity, much of it involving fixed and helicopter airborne survey work, it could be an opportunity worth exploring, they say.
