Winding through a rural highway about a dozen miles northeast of Perryville, Missouri, in early autumn, a visitor discovers that a field of corn stalks ripe for harvest almost swallows a sign announcing the destination: "Sabreliner Aviation".
Lying just beyond the end of the adjacent Perryville Municipal Airport’s 7,000ft runway is the Mississippi River and the small, almost lifeless village of Kaskaskia, Illinois.
Although now nearly abandoned, Kaskaskia was once an important regional centre, and briefly the state capital. Soil erosion forced the riverbanks to drift eastward, however, destroying a once-significant city, leaving virtually no trace. So, the corn stalks of the fertile Mississippi plains recently threatened to engulf Sabreliner’s four-hangar, Perryville campus. Once a thriving assembly centre of the iconic Republic Aviation business jet, Sabreliner was by 2012 on the brink of financial extinction.
When the Perryville assembly line finally closed in the early 1980s, Sabreliner developed into a successful, diversified maintenance centre. Its background as a Sabreliner completions facility and assembly centre lent a rare combination of skills and tools. Commercial and military customers took notice.
But then Sabreliner sold its St Louis-based MidCoast Aviation business to Jet Aviation in 2006. The deal included a broad non-compete agreement with Jet in the commercial market – the company could pursue any domestic or foreign military project, but its commercial activity was largely limited to maintaining the remaining Sabreliner fleet.
By that point, the Perryville-based unit of Sabreliner was focused on a rapidly rising defence business, swollen with demand for maintaining several of the US military’s aging fleets of aircraft, including the Learjet 31-based C-21 and King Air-based C-12. But Sabreliner would have few options when defence spending began declining after 2010, with the commercial business still inaccessible under the non-compete agreement with Jet Aviation.
Perryville remains a maintenance centre for the remaining fleet of Rockwell Sabreliners
Sabreliner
By 2012, Sabreliner had laid off all but a skeleton team administering financial and legal affairs. Then Innovative Capital Holdings – a Naples, Florida-based investment firm – stepped in to purchase the company. The acquisition price was never disclosed, but Innovative Capital’s web site describes a strategy focused on buying aerospace manufacturing companies with deals priced up to $50 million.
Innovative Capital specialises in turnaround jobs, especially within the aerospace industry. It describes itself as an investment firm, drawing a sharp distinction with private equity firms driven by short-term financial objectives.
Innovative Capital is a long-term investor with ambitious goals for the Perryville-based aviation services firm. Those objectives extend beyond revitalizing Sabreliner’s commercial aviation services business, which was abandoned with the sale of MidCoast Aviation to Jet. It also wants Sabreliner to reclaim its original purpose as an aircraft manufacturer – or, at least, a remanufacturer. It has targeted several aircraft types as remanufacturing candidates, including in-production and out-of-production models. Announcements are expected as soon as the NBAA convention later this month.
In the longer-term, Sabreliner’s association with Innovative Capital raises even more intriguing possibilities. Business records online suggest Innovative Capital has acquired New Zealand-based Composite Helicopters. The renamed Inova Composite Helicopters is attempting to transfer composite structure technology to helicopters from New Zealand’s competitive sailing industry. The result is a programme to certificate two light single-engined helicopters with composite semi-monocoque construction – the KC-630 and KC-640.
Sabreliner may prove an attractive site to establish US manufacturing base for such turbine-powered helicopters. In addition to servicing fixed-wing jets, Sabreliner provides a similar line of offerings for military helicopters. On a recent visit, for example, one hangar was occupied by a Mexican Navy H225M, receiving an auxiliary power unit upgrade, and a Jordanian UH-60 Black Hawk undergoing a conversion to a VIP interior.
The helicopter hangar in Perryville reflects the revitalisation of the site under new ownership. The decades-old structure has been extensively refurbished into a modern aerospace manufacturing facility, with LED lighting and clear, bright colours on the floors and walls.
Local operations resumed in Perryville in February 2014 with a new leadership team and a new strategy no longer burdened by the now-expired non-compete agreement with Jet Aviation. The company was again free to pursue a balanced business portfolio of commercial and military work.
Rebalancing the portfolio with a strong commercial services business is a top priority, says Sabreliner president Greg Fedele.
“The military and the commercial stuff in aerospace really do complement each other. When one’s up, the other’s down. That’s usually what we see in aerospace. When you only have one side of that equation and that equation starts going down and you don’t have anything to backfill, that’s an uphill climb,” he says.
“Our plan is to try to stay more balanced in the military and commercial world.”
Non-Sabreliner types are starting to return to Perryville for a variety of jobs. Sabreliner, in fact, is negotiating a new partnership with Dassault, with the goal to offer parts services outside the network of authorized service centres.
“That’s more our core business,” Fedele says. “If you look at our strategy, we are growing our core business, what we have here today.”
The rural Perryville site seems an unlikely location for a full service aircraft manufacturer, but those capabilities still reside inside Sabreliner’s hangars, which include shops for paint, upholstery, avionics, engines and composite structures.
“We have a broader capability than most,” Fedele says. “We only do everything. You name something on an airplane we can do it. It’s crazy when you walk through here and you see everything they had, and it’s laid out perfectly from when they used to do the finishing work for the Sabreliners.”
But the re-emerging company still commands a significant military business. Through it no longer supports the US Air Force C-21 fleet, it remains a specialist on developing analytical data on the USAF’s aging aircraft fleets. In late September, the Air Force Academy awarded Sabreliner a contract worth up to $100 million over the next five years under the Center for Aircraft Structural Life Extension (CASTLE) programme.
The contract has Sabreliner receiving KC-135s that have been retired, cut-up and delivered on pallets. Workers at the company’s site in nearby St. Genevieve, Missouri, dismantle each piece of the remaining structure, down to bolts and rivets. The pieces are then sent to the Air Force Academy for laboratory analysis, helping the CASTLE staff determine which aging issues the USAF can expect to appear next.
All the activity around the company has raised questions about the company’s branding. For some its name implies a focus on the dwindling fleet of Sabreliner jets, or its T-39 predecessor as a military trainer. The company still provides such services, but it is a diminishing minority of business activity.
“People say, ‘I didn’t know you did that’. We hear it all the time,” Fedele says, “because we couldn’t compete [until 2011, due to the Jet Aviation agreement] and we have a pretty robust portfolio. It’s just getting the word out there.”
Source: FlightGlobal.com
