Innovation is an oft overused and under-achieved term these days. But back in the early days of aviation, lots of Americans seemed to be running over with it. In Portland, Oregon, a few business leaders got together in the 1940s and decided to bring solutions to the Pacific Northwest’s transportation challenges, forever cementing their place in aviation history and providing an enduring legacy that continues to this day.
Invention was the name of the game when Si King and Charlie Miller joined forces to lead the young aviation startup, Flightcraft, at Portland’s newly minted super airport, now PDX. King, Flightcraft’s president and manager, continually looked for ways to make moving aircraft, baggage and people around the Flightcraft tarmac easier and safer. While Miller, Flightcraft secretary and treasurer, wanted to carry more in easier ways on every aircraft available. Their colleague and Flightcraft vice president C.D. Weyerhaeuser designed and implemented a hangar opening, a single-span of local wood, strong enough and wide enough to accommodate the long wingspans of the day.
But it’s important to understand how the area got to its current airport configuration. Portland has used two locations over the years for its major commercial airport – Swan Island from 1927 to 1940 and the floodplain of the Columbia River since 1940. The second site has seen repeated adjustments of runways and expansions and upgrades of terminal facilities. As of recently, it served millions of passengers with direct flights to almost 100 domestic and double-digit international destinations.
Swan Island was a marshy, undeveloped swampland in the mid-20s. A major dredging project moved the natural island and attached it to the east bank of the river. Construction of the airport by the Port of Portland began in 1926, and Swan Island Municipal Airport opened on September 14, 1927. Charles Lindbergh, who was on a nationwide tour flying The Spirit of St. Louis, took part in the opening ceremonies. The Oregon Journal reported that Lindbergh “landed like a feather with the punctuality of a crack railroad train.”
But as air travel increased and the needs of travelers outgrew the island site, it became apparent that Portland needed another airport. By 1935, Swan Island Airport became obsolete. The small airfield couldn’t easily be expanded, nor could it accommodate the larger aircraft and passenger loads expected to become common in Portland. Plans immediately were conceived to relocate the outdated airfield to a larger site.
In 1936, with a $300,000 bond issue, the City of Portland purchased 700 acres of land along the Columbia River. This, too, was marshy riverside land that needed 4 million cubic yards of dredged landfill to be usable. A $1.3 million grant from the Works Progress Administration, a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, helped pay for construction costs. The Portland-Columbia Airport was completed in 1940, with its opening ceremony on October 13.
A new terminal was located off Marine Drive with the runways forming an X toward the western side of the airport. Its location identifier PDX was adopted after World War II, by adding X to the existing National Weather Service identifier, much like Los Angeles and Phoenix. The Port of Portland constructed a new terminal in 1959 between two parallel runways that had been newly constructed. That runway configuration remains in use, and terminal expansions and upgrades followed in 1977, 1986, 1992 and 1994.
Eight years after the new airport’s opening, Flightcraft began operations. The Beechcraft Bonanza happened to be introduced the year prior, and Flightcraft was heralded as one of the early stars in the Beechcraft dealer constellation. There were as many as six Flightcraft locations at one point.
We can credit the development of the electric scoop-type aircraft tug to Si King, one of Flightcraft’s founders. In 1945, Wilt Paulson founded the Willamette Aircraft and Engine Company in Beaverton, Oregon, to repurpose military aircraft for crop dusting and other civilian uses. After a move to Warrenton, Oregon in 1948, Paulson’s business morphed into the electric vehicle company known as LEKTRO. LEKTRO developed products for the logging, farming, golf and aviation industries. In 1967, Paulson and Si King got together to solve the problem caused by tow bars of the day, which often damaged aircraft nose gear when towing. Si King envisioned a system in which the nose gear could be lifted with a scoop to cradle the gear, eliminating the towbar. They created the Airporter electric towbarless tug. Thousands were built and sold around the world, and the concept is still in widespread use today.
It was the Beech 18’s height of popularity, and the Flightcraft team sold and serviced the amazing twin from its Portland facility. They operated Flightcraft out of PDX until the early 1970s when Beech Holdings bought the company to maintain its service center. Less than a year later, in 1973, Vin Manilla and David Hinson bought Flightcraft from Beech Holdings, and Hinson stayed on until 1978 when he left to start Midway Airlines. Hinson eventually was appointed to head the FAA under President Clinton.
Flightcraft was acquired by The Papé Group, a family-owned business specializing in capital equipment distributorships. It controls distribution of such heavy equipment manufacturers as John Deere, Hyster, Ditchwitch and Bobcat.
The Papé Group had been a Flightcraft customer, said Phil Botana, Flightcraft’s previous president, and bought into the business as another capital equipment distributor with a reputation for strong aftermarket support. “What Papé found,” said Botana, “was that this is a similar business but with a very different client base. Management was able to build relationships with other aircraft-operator customers – relationships that have helped the parent company prosper.”
Botana said, “The partnership decided to get out of the business. It’s likely the company management wanted to be in control of who ultimately took over the dealership.” Botana credits his predecessor, Ernie Sturm, with building Flightcraft’s business into what it had become by then. He said Papé hired Sturm when it acquired the company, and he led the business through some difficult times. We have written a lot about Beechcraft’s mid-1980s decision to change its business relationship with its dealers. Under the old scenario, Botana said, most of a dealer’s profits were generated through aircraft sales. Maintenance and other support functions were not considered profit centers, and they existed at the dealer level mostly to support the sales department.
Beechcraft completely rewrote the business model. Botana said, “The [original] arrangement led to underdevelopment of the support market. Then when the [OEM] takes away the sales profits, it’s tough to revamp and turn around the business model.” Shop rates weren’t necessarily intended to generate profit but to incentivize owners to buy another airplane. When it became necessary to raise maintenance rates to generate profit, customers found it a difficult pill to swallow.
Sturm navigated the treacherous waters, though Flightcraft scaled back from its high of as many as six locations to its then two-facility status, with operations in Portland (PDX) and Eugene (EUG), Oregon. Sturm secured Cessna Citation service center status, and revenues from the four main lines of business roughly started to break out as 35 percent for tech support, 30 percent for line service, 20 percent for sales and brokerage activity, and the remaining 15 percent from charter and aircraft management income.
After the sale to Dean Papé, the company started an aggressive expansion that would result in Flightcraft FBO and maintenance facilities in Portland and Eugene, Spokane and Seattle, Washington, and Hayward and Oakland, California. Over time, the company sold off all but the Portland and Eugene FBOs. A new FAA tower, parking garage, and canopy over drop-off lanes were completed in 1999.
Brent Fraser, Flightcraft’s general manager, took a job with Flightcraft as a mechanic in 1999, but after about a year, moved for a position as a mechanic managing aircraft for ACM Aviation in Silicon Valley. He remained there until 2009. “I always kept my eye on Flightcraft because I felt it had significant potential,” Fraser said.
By 2011, Atlantic Aviation had acquired Flightcraft and rebranded its FBO businesses. However, the maintenance side of the operation retained the Flightcraft name. They wanted to build a future-proof business, and Brent Fraser was again back to lead the way. Flightcraft built new hangar facilities and left the 1950s-era wooden arches behind them.
According to AIN at the time, Fraser said, “Through conversations with colleagues, I became aware that Atlantic Aviation wanted to strengthen and build the maintenance, repair and overhaul portion of the business, so I aggressively approached them about playing a key role in that effort. I always loved the area and the company; I watched them for 10 years waiting for such an opportunity to arise,” he said.
“The day I walked in the door, my singular goal was to make Flightcraft the only show around.” To do that, Fraser drew on his experience as Hawker crew chief at the KC Aviation facility in Westfield, Massachusetts, during the 1990s. He told AIN, “I was part of an aggressive program that saw that business grow from 10 employees to several hundred. It was done by extremely hard work, never saying no, and with the determination that if we weren’t able to specifically help a customer, we made sure to find a way to get it done.” He employed the same strategy at Flightcraft and “the growth we’ve experienced to date underscores its importance.”
Through Fraser’s leadership, Flightcraft has grown from its two locations in Portland and Eugene to include another facility at BFI, Boeing Field in Seattle, Washington. BFI was established to serve a market of fleet operators, but technicians from Oregon can travel to Seattle to take care of any needs at any location.
Currently, Flightcraft maintains classic Dassault Falcon jets and Textron Aviation’s King Air and Citation lines. Fraser said, “We’ve done more than just expand our capabilities to service Falcons, we’ve brought some of the most knowledgeable technicians available to lead the way. We offer full capabilities to keep any flight department in the air. We support our customers through decades of combined skills to give you unmatched quality in work, pricing and on-time delivery.”
In addition to Falcon support, Flightcraft is a Textron Aviation authorized service center (ASC) and a Citation certified repair station with AOG support all day, every day. Their team are experts with the 500 series Citation line having more than 20 years of Citation-heavy maintenance experience.
It is evident that now, just as in the 1940s, that Flightcraft is a shining example of innovation and determination. Through ownership changes, market changes and industry changes, the leaders at Flightcraft made the right decisions and found new avenues to success, solving problems in unique ways. That is actually the definition of innovation.
