Nashville's general aviation firms see end to downturn

Allen Howell, along with his father, Reece, started a charter-flight business at the Smyrna Airport in 1982, beginning with a single airplane and a single employee.
Today, his company, Corporate Flight Management, operates a fleet of 23 aircraft and employs 180 people in a business that includes worldwide charter flights, aircraft maintenance and restoration. The company also runs a flight school.

Despite all of the growth, Howell found his company mired in the recession over the past year as he faced the worst downturn in his 28 years in the business.

But the company has survived without any layoffs, and there are signs that business may finally be picking up, he said. "The worst is behind us, and I believe that any of us that are still in business now probably will make it."

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Among factors that pulled his company through was a lucrative business restoring old turboprop planes that had been stored for years in the desert of the Southwest in places such as Kingman, Ariz., and selling them to small commuter airlines outside North America, Howell said.

Not all general-aviation industry firms have been as fortunate.

As U.S. commercial airlines have absorbed billions of dollars in losses, the private side of flying — business and recreational aviation — has experienced an unprecedented decline as well because of the weakened economy.

Cutbacks hurt industry

General aviation, which includes almost everything except the major airlines and military aircraft, began to slide in fall 2008, when companies began scaling back their own corporate aircraft fleets and cutting corporate travel, including charter flights.

Manufacturers of business aircraft such as Learjet, Cessna and Gulfstream went almost overnight from having years worth of backlogged orders to having almost no orders at all, said Dan Hubbard, spokesman for the National Business Aviation Association.

During 2009, prices of used business aircraft dropped by as much as 50 percent; many general-aviation manufacturers and flight providers went out of business; and tens of thousands of employees lost their jobs, Hubbard said.

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