New Epic Air owners gearing up
Bend kit airplane company prepapring to restart production after bankruptcy
By Adrianne Jeffries / The Bulletin
Air two months ago have been quietly reviving the business, which has been shuttered for months.
The new owners hired 16 full-time employees over the past month and are on track to hire more this year, said Doug King, one of seven former customers who took over the company.
About two-thirds of the employees are workers who were laid off by the original Epic, King said. The rest are new employees like Karl Baldessari, a former production manager at the Cessna Aircraft Co. factory in Bend , who was hired as Epic's general manager.
For now, employees are busy cleaning up the facility, fixing broken equipment and doing maintenance on the fleet of small aircraft manufactured by Epic as “kits” for pilots to help assemble. Employees can build some parts, but “we have a lot of work to do before we can build planes,” King said.
The new owners originally incorporated as LT Builders Group but registered Epic Aircraft LLC as a subsidiary company on May 24.
Making planes
The new company will manufacture and sell the Epic LT, a lightweight, 400 mph six-seat airplane that sells for almost $2 million as a “kit” that must be partly assembled by the buyers, who work on their planes at Epic's factory.
Manufacturers that sell planes as kits can avoid the lengthy and often expensive Federal Aviation Administration certification process before marketing their planes.
But aircraft owners probably won't be able to come in and build planes for 90 days, King said, primarily because the FAA raised a “procedural issue” on which he declined to elaborate.
Epic could hire twice or even three times as many workers and start full production sooner if it weren't for the delay imposed by the FAA, King said.
The original Epic Air filed for bankruptcy in August 2009 after it was sued for alleged breach of contract by a Florida company.
Epic was put up for auction and a bankruptcy judge ultimately awarded it to the LT Builders Group with the stipulation that the group work out an agreement with a Chinese company that had the highest bid.
Ties to Bend
Keeping the company local was especially important to the city of Bend , which received more than $1.3 million in 2005 from the state economic development department to build infrastructure for Epic's facility at Bend Municipal Airport .
About $500,000 of that was a grant contingent upon the creation of 214 jobs by June 2010. Epic employed 159 at its peak.
But in March, the state gave the city a two-year extension on the deadline to come up with the remaining 55 jobs at the airport in light of the bad economy, said Mike Solt, a regional coordinator for the economic development department.
Companies benefiting from the infrastructure at the airport paid for by the grant must create 55 new jobs by June 2012 or the city will be on the hook for $2,500 for each job not created, Solt said, although there is some room for interpretation when it comes time for the state to count jobs.
Epic is committed to staying in Bend , King said, in part because of the talent pool of aviation workers left from the closure of Epic and Cessna. Cessna closed its Bend plant last year, shifting work to its headquarters in Kansas and some to Mexico .
The new Epic has kept the same phone numbers, address and website. King, who is from California , said he rented a house in Bend on Wednesday and plans to register to vote soon.
Chinese connection
The company's new Chinese connection could be a boon for local jobs, King said.
China Aviation Industry General Aircraft, or CAIGA, the Chinese company that bid on Epic, licensed the technology to manufacture overseas for sale everywhere but in North America , where Epic can sell Bend-built planes.
CAIGA will help Epic grow because it has bigger coffers and can seek out new designs, King said.
“There will be more jobs in Bend because of this partnership than the other way around,” he said.
