Company gearing up to produce planes

Truckload by truckload, Commander Premier Aircraft has filled up a spacious hangar at the Cape Girardeau Regional Airport with the heavy duty equipment needed to manufacture the high-priced, single-engine planes.

And the equipment and parts are still coming.

Company officials finalized a rental agreement with the city of Cape Girardeau on Oct. 6, clearing the way for the aviation firm to relocate its manufacturing, sales, parts and service operations from Bethany, Okla.

The company will operate out of the former Renaissance Aircraft hangar.

But even the 52,000-square-foot hangar isn't big enough. The hangar has 48,000 square feet of industrial space and another 4,000 square feet of office space.

To address its space needs, the firm also has rented 24,000 square feet of warehouse space in a building on Rust Avenue owned by Cape Girardeau businessman Gary Rust, chairman of the the Southeast Missourian.

Commander Premier trucked in 24 tractor-trailer loads of parts and equipment over the past three weeks. The company still has 17 more truckloads of parts and equipment to move, said Carl Gull, vice president of operations for Commander Premier.

Gull is Commander's only full-time employee in Cape Girardeau right now.

Walking through the airport hangar with journalists, Gull stopped to point out various molds for everything from the cockpit to airplane doors.

The hangar is full of jigs, metal frames on which different pieces of the four-seat, single-engine plane are fashioned and riveted together.

Gull said all of the parts and equipment should be in place by mid-November. The company is already putting together its management staff. The company hopes to begin hiring workers for its airplane plant in December.

The firm initially will operate with about 10 employees before expanding to about 35 people, Gull said.

Commander Premier hopes to expand to about 100 jobs within three years.

The Federal Aviation Administration will have to inspect and approve the operation before the company can start building planes, Gull said.

It could be late March or early April before the company starts manufacturing the planes.

Producing a single plane takes 10,000 parts and 90 days from start to finish, Gull said.

Fifteen percent of those parts will be manufactured in Cape Girardeau. The rest will be purchased from other suppliers and then assembled at the Cape Girardeau hangar.

Company president Joel Hartstone compared the plane to a Mercedes. "We believe it is the finest single-engine plane," he said at a news conference at the Cape Girardeau airport on Oct. 6.

The aluminum planes, which can cruise at 200 mph, will sell for about $600,000 each. They will have all-leather interiors. The leather comes from Scotland, Gull said.

Every part, no matter how small, must be meticulously labeled and the company must keep detailed records to meet FAA requirements. Gull said that's so every piece of an airplane can be traced back to the manufacturer in the event of an accident.

Once manufactured, the planes must be test flown. Test flights will occur out of the Cape Girardeau airport.

Then they will have to be flown elsewhere for exterior paint work. "We don't have a paint facility here," he said.

The first planes aren't expected off the assembly line until next summer.

The company hopes to build 15 planes in 2006 and up to 30 a year after that.

Cape Girardeau airport manager Bruce Loy said the hangar is starting to look like a manufacturing plant.

"It is chock full of equipment," he said.

That wasn't the case with financially troubled Renaissance Aircraft which abandoned plans to build airplanes in Cape Girardeau late last year and left the city with costly bond payments to make.

Burdened with litigation, Renaissance never secured the funding needed to build aircraft during its three years in Cape Girardeau.

It took the city 10 months to find a new tenant.

City officials believe this one will succeed.

Commander Premier was created by 50 owners of Commander airplanes. They acquired the assets of the former manufacturer in June after the original company in Oklahoma went bankrupt. The new company had to relocate because it lost its lease on the Oklahoma building where the planes previously had been built.

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123