A little over 30 years ago, John Gillespie merged his aircraft sales business, Rapid Aircraft, with his aircraft painting company, Flying Colours Corp. — creating the company known today. The merger happened out of an opportunity he noticed at the time.
“He noted customers he’d sold aircraft to were coming back for paintwork modifications serviced by Flying Colours Corp. They then returned for small maintenance repairs, which became more extensive as the aircraft sold grew in size. Gillespie, Flying Colours’ President, saw an opportunity to diversify,” recounted Eric Gillespie, executive vice president of Flying Colours Corp.
Since then, Flying Colours has offered the full spectrum of maintenance, repair, paintwork, overhaul and interior support services and has grown from a 20-some employee company to an international company with a 500-strong workforce.
Gillespie said Flying Colours’ aim is to offer high-quality services supported by excellent customer service to maintain their position in the market. This is helped by the way in which Flying Colours values its workforce, deeming them to be essential to the success of the business.
“We invest continuously to improve our offerings and remain competitive,” Gillespie added. “We place flexibility, innovation and integrity at the core of our company philosophy. In practice, this means that we will always find solutions to customer requests and are ready to take on any challenge.”
Flying Colours Corp. supports the international business aviation sector with:
- Green Completions
- Interior Refurbishment & Modifications
- Heavy Maintenance
- Exterior Paint
- Avionics Installations and upgrades
They also support the special missions market with:
- Medevac modifications, installation and multi-purpose (VIP and Medevac option in same cabin)
- Surveillance, military mission specific aircraft
- Cargo
- Mutli-purpose aircraft – specifically Q400 with five different configurations
“One of our key strengths and unique qualities that sets us apart is the diversity of our offering. When the market is trending to buy new aircraft, we are busy with completions. When the market is benefiting from the value of pre-owned aircraft, we offer modifications and refurbishment. For all these aircraft, we offer maintenance support too and upgrades to their avionics. Outside of the corporate and private owners, we also work with governments for special mission aircraft, which is invariably a key part of their transport and/or military infrastructure,” Gillespie said.
As its reputation grew within North America, the Canadian-based company knew it needed a physical presence in the U.S. to serve a growing demand of N-registered aircraft owners. Business was also being limited by the physical size of the Ontario facility, so Flying Colours purchased JetCorp Tech Services in St. Louis, MO. in 2009. In 2013, JetCorp became Flying Colours Corp., located at the Spirit of St. Louis Airport and aligning the brand and processes across the North America.
Later in 2013, Flying Colours launched its special-missions division — a venture that was significant for a number of reasons, as Gillespie described.
“Bombardier appointed the team to handle a two-year project, which involved extensive modification of seven CRJ700 NextGen aircraft for a Chinese client. The work also included generating supplemental type certificates that needed to satisfy the Chinese Civil Aviation Authorities. In the same year, Flying Colours undertook the completion of a further five green Challenger 850s, of which the cabin volume is the same size as the Global 6000,” Gillespie said.
The project led to an ongoing alliance between Flying Colours and the Canadian OEM, which sees all Flying Colours facilities supporting work across the Bombardier Global, Challenger and Learjet aircraft. The CRJ work also opened the doors to Flying Colours working in Asia, leading to a number of projects, such as being selected by Bombardier to provide interiors support services within the OEM’s Seletar Airport facility to complement their own maintenance services in 2015.
Recently, Flying Colours opened a fully-computerized climate-controlled paint shop at their Peterborough facility. This is the most advanced paint preparation and application facility the business owns and is large enough to paint business aircraft up to Global 7500 size or executive airlines such as the A220 — a first for the business to have the capacity to accommodate narrow body aircraft.
“It incorporates the latest technology, is purpose built and designed for functionality with environmental sustainability in mind. We expanded the paint technician team and offer a variety of paint techniques including electro-static applications. We are also moving away from chromate primers to non-chromate products, to deliver improved specifications and conformances for the aviation industry to improve the paint finish, reduce waste and make a positive impact to worker’s health and environmental protection,” Gillespie added.
Expansion has been the name of the game for Flying Colours, as for the past 12 months, the company has increased the capacity of each of it’s three locations. Expansion, Gillespie said, is a key business driver for the company at this time.
“Expansion is a key business driver right now. In St Louis. the team moved into a new hangar this January, which is large enough to accommodate three Global type aircraft at any one time. This followed the outfitting of a purpose-built manufacturing workshop, which primarily supports the design, build and finishing of woodwork monuments for large business jet cabins. This increased productivity by 600 percent and was the first major infrastructure change since the acquisition. Meanwhile at Peterborough, work is progressing on construction of the largest building — this incorporates the dedicated paint shop. In Singapore, Flying Colours Corp. PTE is ramping up expansion preparations to align with the growth of the Bombardier Business Aircraft Service Centre at Seletar Airport, which is quadrupling in size,” he said.
Gillespie added that Flying Colours can now cover every area of MRO — modifying interiors, painting the fuselage and upgrading avionics at the same time. “Owners like this as it reduces the down time of the aircraft,” said Gillespie.
The expansion has lead to the positive challenge of needing to recruit more employees, sometimes even from outside of the tradition aviation-oriented sectors. “The expansion has meant that we’ve had to recruit around 100 new workforce members, which is always a challenge, but we’ve approached the challenge in a number of ways. In addition to the traditional recruiting methods, we introduced a series of recruitment events to attract new and existing talent on site. We have also explored the opportunities presented. As every project is unique and requires a mixed set of talents and skilled labor of a variety of technicians and artisans to perform detailed, hand-crafted work, so we’ll often look outside the industry to recruit cabinetry, upholstery, electrical and sheet metal expertise,” Gillespie described.
While Flying Colours has been tackling the positive challenges of growing their company, the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have also loomed. Gillespie said, though, that it has given business aviation a chance to step up and assist the world through the crisis.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that business aviation can offer support where commercial airlines can’t. It was the last aviation sector to stop flying, in fact, it never stopped, and it is the first back in the skies highlighting its flexibility and adaptability. It has played an essential part in repatriation flights as well as cargo and medevac journeys which shows that the business aviation sector offers an invaluable tool for those that need to move between two points quickly and efficiently. Now that passengers are needing to travel again, business aviation is providing a relatively safe and known environment in which to fly,” Gillespie explained.
With business aviation stepping up, Gillespie said Flying Colours is starting to see requests from new entrants to the market and receiving requests for modifications to make aircraft multi-purpose.
“In addition, there are a number of emerging markets that are still in the early stages of business aviation and they will all need the support of our type of service. This all goes alongside our regular business from our customers, some of which we’ve worked with throughout our existence as a full MRO. We are optimistic about the future for business aviation,” Gillespie added.
