It was a hot and rainy summer for the Lincoln, Nebraska, construction crews working on Duncan Aviation’s newest addition—a 45,000-square-foot paint facility being built on the south end of the general aviation side of the Lincoln Airport (LNK).
Todd Duncan, Chairman of Duncan Aviation and grandson of company founder Donald Duncan, said the new paint facility will help us better serve our customers for years to come.
“Over the last decade, many of our customers have purchased larger aircraft while our paint facilities in Lincoln have remained the same for 20 years. Given the mix of aircraft our customers now fly, we need to expand paint capacity if we want to continue to serve our clientele at our Lincoln facility with full exterior paint services,” Todd says. “We completed a similar paint facility at our Battle Creek, Michigan, location in September 2007. We want to provide the same nose-to-tail services for those large aircraft customers who want exterior paint and want to come to Lincoln.”
The new paint structure, which will cost roughly $10.5 million to build, will allow input of some of the largest business aircraft in use today, including Gulfstream’s 550, Bombardier’s Global Express and Dassault’s Falcon 7X. It will not necessarily add more paint slots to the Lincoln facility’s paint service capacity, but will allow the ability to serve a larger mix of customers.
The hangar, which will be completed in late spring 2012, will have the latest down-draft air flow technology, including automatic monitoring and alarms, to provide the best paint environment possible for aircraft. To increase efficiency, the hangar is designed to accommodate multiple aircraft at once, utilizing a two-zone airflow system. With this design, Duncan Aviation paint teams can perform stripping, sanding, painting and detail work on multiple aircraft simultaneously.
The new paint facility follows on the heels of Duncan Aviation’s announcement last fall of its new “chrome-free” paint process. Duncan Aviation partnered with paint experts and over the past several years they have collectively developed a new chrome-free paint process that is better for the environment, better for the paint technicians and better for the aircraft. Duncan Aviation has also worked closely with the Federal Aviation Administration and last fall received approval to amend its proprietary FAA-Approved Paint Process to include the new processes and products.
For more information on Duncan Aviation’s aircraft paint capabilities, please visit www.DuncanAviation.aero/paint.