Business View Magazine - Sept 2023

283 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 9 RICK HUSBAND AMARI LLO INTERNAT IONAL AI RPORT have a maintenance facility here called Flight Mechanix. Their maintenance business has been going like gangbusters and so they’ve decided they want to build an FBO here to handle additional traffic,” he points out. “They’re building a large hangar and we’re excited to have them here, as well. I think, in the long run, you’ll see a good uptick here in GA traffic. With the new FBO coming on, I think we’ll see a lot more of the mid-sized jets that we don’t see, right now. That’s where Haven Arrow will come in.” “Right before the pandemic, we had a really bad storm and it blew off the roof of one of our larger hangars and we had to scrap the whole hangar. Within the last eight months, a replacement hangar opened and it’s a beautiful facility. Signature operates that for us as they did the previous hangar. It’s got some office space attached to it and it’s fully heated.” “Also, we’re going to be switching our existing maintenance group, which is English Field Aviation – their contract ends with Signature at the end of this month. We’re not quite sure who that’s going to be at this point; Signature is looking at several options to replace them. We hope that whatever that company is, they’ll have a good business plan to increase maintenance here. I think that will go over well with the community -- there’ll be a bit of competition between the two; prices will be good; and we’ll have a broader aircraft focus. So, there are a lot of good things happening in the GA world.” The challenges ahead Despite that good news, confronting the nation’s widespread pilot shortage is a tougher nut to crack. “We don’t do any flight training here,” Conner laments. “Our colleges don’t do that either. We have one flight school here, but they’ve kind of scaled down. If I had my wish, I’d like to move some additional flight training here from larger companies that do simulator training. That would help out the pilot situation. And I think that it would also help attract other aviation businesses here to Amarillo.” Other current challenges include maintaining airport staffing at a level commensurate with customers’ needs. “Keeping staff and attracting new staff that have the skills to make this airport great is always a challenge,” Connor states. So is maintaining AMA’s main terminal that underwent a $52.2 million renovation in 2010-11.