During the NBAA show, turbine-engine-overhaul and repair specialist Dallas Airmotive, a BBA Aviation subsidiary, is rebuilding a PT6A engine live at the BBA Aviation booth (228). The company is also overhauling its corporate structure to accommodate its recently opened full-service PT6A service center. The new shop is established in a renovated and enlarged 10,000-sq-ft hangar at Dallas Love Field. At a party there last month, Dallas Airmotive celebrated its 50th anniversary, as well as its half-century involvement with the legendary Pratt & Whitney Canada turbine powerplant.
Dallas Airmotive president Doug Meador acknowledged growing pains, but said he expects the facility will soon be able to process between 25 and 30 engines a month. “It’s really something special,” he said, adding that no other authorized service center can match Dallas Airmotive for organization and exclusive focus on the PT6 series.
Meador told AIN the new shop was designed with efficiency in mind and can handle anything that needs to be done on the engine. “What we’ve created with this facility is an authorized ‘grey’ shop. It will have the flexibility, the speed and the customer focus that a typical non-authorized PT6 facility might have, but with the legacy and heritage of Pratt & Whitney Canada as well as the Dallas Airmotive name.”
At a second location on Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), the company has just broken ground on two major construction projects. The first is a 30,000-sq-ft engine-test complex, including three turboshaft and three turbofan test cells. “Our new test cells will have the capacity to handle ‘most all of our current authorizations, plus the capacity to accommodate the engines and authorizations in our future growth strategy,” said Meador. “Large-cabin business aircraft and helicopters continue to drive the growth in new [aircraft] deliveries and we plan to be there when those customers need us.” According to the company, DFW was selected due to its location, traffic, and space available for future expansion.
Dallas Airmotive is also currently building a 200,000-sq-ft “rotorcraft center of excellence,” adjacent to the engine-test facility. After the company’s recent authorization to service the Pratt & Whitney Canada PW200 and PW210 engines, it decided to move its Rolls-Royce 250 and 300 engine programs from Neosho, Mo., to improve price competitiveness and reduce turnaround times.
The new facility is slated to open the first half of next year, and it will initially occupy only half the available floor space. “As we looked at the economies of scale, it made more sense to go ahead and build a building larger than we needed to facilitate future expansion plans and growth,” explained Meador. The company believes the facility will prove popular with rotorcraft operators, allowing them to come to “one location dedicated to their type of business, their engine models and their aircraft.”
Abu Dhabi Facility
H+S Aviation plans to extend that business strategy to the Middle East, where it is scheduled to open a similar 40,000-sq-ft service center by the end of this year. Work at the Abu Dhabi location will initially focus on the PW200 and 210, along with the PT6C-67 series on the AgustaWestland AW139 and Airbus Helicopters EC175 as well as the PT6T Twin-Pac engine as found on Agusta and Bell 212 and 412 helicopters.
“We will use that as a base to serve the region, much as we do with our Singapore facility in Southeast Asia,” noted Meador. “We will eventually grow that facility as customer demand grows for different engine types and services.”
Once the new facilities are on line, the company will have the capability to service approximately 70 percent of the rotorcraft engines in the market, powering some 20,000 helicopters.
According to Meador, the changes have taken its sales force from a product-oriented mindset where a specific engine-type person would travel the country chasing down users of that particular engine, to one where marketing reps will have a small territory in which they are able to make more frequent contact with customers.
“We’ve utilized this same model internationally for many years with a lot of success, so we’ve elected to go with that model, which we felt would bring us much closer to where the customer is making the decision,” Meador said, adding the company also took steps to decentralize its formerly centralized Dallas field-service organization into five U.S. regions, allowing for a quicker and more efficient response to customers.
In line with that concept, Dallas Airmotive is the first of the four Honeywell-authorized channel partners to adopt the On Wing combustion replacement process for the HTF7000 engine, which reduces maintenance time by 20 percent. “We are really looking at ways that we can serve the customer more efficiently,” said Meador. “They want to be back in the air as fast as they can, and for [as little cost] as possible.”
