Sabreliner opens new multimillion-dollar painting hangar

PERRYVILLE, Mo. -- Sabreliner celebrated the opening of its new $7 million aircraft painting hangar at the Perryville airport Friday, but without the jobs company executives hoped it would provide.

"We've had a setback," said Jim Meier, senior vice president of government and corporate aviation services at Sabreliner.

Some of the military aircraft refurbishment work Sabreliner was doing at the time the new facility was planned is now being done internally instead of being contracted out, Meier said.

Sabreliner continues to employ 441 people in Perryville. The hundreds of jobs it anticipated adding are on hold for now.

"It is still our intent to add a couple hundred jobs over the next few years," Meier said.

Last September, Gov. Jay Nixon announced nearly $5 million in state economic development incentives to assist Sabreliner with the new stripping and painting facility. Of that, $3.7 million was in Missouri Quality Jobs program tax credits, which aren't granted until after new employees are hired.

"Our incentive programs are performance-based, which means employers who have been approved for benefits under a program like Missouri Quality Jobs must create the jobs they have pledged to create before receiving incentives," said John Fougere, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Economic Development. A million dollars awarded was in the form of a grant to the city of Perryville to fund infrastructure improvements in the area of the Sabreliner site.

"Our combined plan was that as they grew Sabreliner, we, in turn, would grow Perryville and Perry County," said Perryville Mayor Debbie Gahan. "We met that goal together."

The 32,000-square-foot hangar built by Perryville-based Robinson Construction will eliminate a bottleneck in Sabreliner's refurbishing process, increasing its efficiency, Meier said.

"Everything that comes through here still needs to be painted," he said. "We had already converted part of Hangar 2 into a paint facility. We had begun conversion of part of Hangar 7 to use for paint overflow. These were all Band-Aid fixes to a long-term potential problem."

About 25 people will work at the new paint hangar -- which has a large bay for stripping and sanding and another for aircraft painting -- when it's fully operating. Sabreliner will be able to handle larger aircraft than it previously had the capacity for.

"This facility has opened up a whole new marketplace we can go into to do more privately owned corporate aircraft," said Robert Hawkes, manager of paint operations at Sabreliner.

Workers use an electrostatic paint process, in which the aircraft has a negative charge and the paint has a positive charge to help reduce the amount of paint used and the ozone-depleting emissions during paint application. Electrostatic paint guns reduce emissions by 35 percent compared to a standard paint gun.

The hangar is also climate controlled and has a three-stage air filtration system.

All the equipment is housed on the hangar's second floor in the event of a major flood, like the 1993 flood that inundated the Sabreliner facility.

Sabreliner has been a fixture in the Perryville community since beginning operations in 1954, at that time as a division of Rockwell International. In 1983, the Sabreliner division was purchased by Holmes Lamoreaux, who still owns the company.

Gahan said she hopes Sabreliner's expansion project will help provide Perry County children the opportunity to continue to live and work there well into the future.

"We see industrial growth as the opportunity for our children to use the education they need to succeed in their hometown while they in turn raise their children to succeed and live here and on and on," she said. "That's the result we are looking for when we partner with a premier industry like Sabreliner."

mmiller@semissourian.com

388-3646

Pertinent address:

1390 Highway H, Perryville, Mo