Duncan Aviation expansion
This rendering shows what Duncan Aviation's new $25 million paint facility will look like when its completed in early 2026.
Duncan Aviation will begin construction in December on a new, $25 million paint facility in Lincoln.
The project at the company’s maintenance, repair and overhaul facility at the Lincoln Airport will connect to an existing paint facility that was built in 2012, according to the company website. Mike Minchow, the company’s chief operating officer, said that the new building is for larger aircraft.
“When we looked at our existing paint hangars, paint bay one and two, we recognize that we're limited in the size of aircraft we can put in those hangars,” Minchow said.
The new building will replace two existing paint bays that were built in 1990, Minchow said. Those paint hangars fit the majority of aircraft at the time. However, Duncan Aviation is adapting to support larger aircraft like the Gulfstream G650, Falcon 10X and Bombardier Global 7500. The goal of the facility will be to increase the company's flexibility to work on more types of aircraft, rather than to increase its capacity.
The building will include a 32,500-square-foot dual-bay paint hangar, a 9,000-square-foot storage and support space, and an expansion to the ramp on the building’s west side.
The Lincoln facility paints about 105 aircraft each year, and Duncan Aviation paints 250 enterprise-wide, according to its website.
Minchow said that the company doesn’t have capacity for smaller paint requests.
“With aircraft we bring in for maintenance, sometimes they're not doing a complete paint job and they just want to touch up and maybe some detail work,” Minchow said. “This will allow us that extra hangar capacity to do some of that additional detail paint touch-up work as required.”
The new building also will be equipped with small booths for painting component parts that come off of aircraft, Minchow said.
Construction on the hangar is expected to be completed in January 2026. After the facility is open, the company plans to decommission the two paint bays built in 1990 and repurpose that space.
Other recent construction at Duncan has included a maintenance hangar expansion that opened in February and an engine shop expansion that broke ground in August, Minchow said.
Tectonic Management Group worked to design and engineer all of those projects. It also is working on the paint hangar project, which will be built by Lincoln construction firm Hausmann Construction.
Frank Jacobson, an architect who is vice president of Tectonic Management Group, said adding two cross-draft bays will allow Duncan to create a controlled environment to spray paint, and then the air is cleaned by filters above the hangar door.
“What's really nice about the booths that Duncan has been using is 80% of the air gets recirculated,” Jacobson said. “So very little air gets wasted and pushed out into the atmosphere. So it's a very energy-efficient green system.”
The painting booths inside the hangar will also be air conditioned in the summer, which will benefit employees, Jacobson said.
“Duncan's taking that into consideration, just trying to create a more comfortable environment for their employees and also get a better paint job by controlling the humidity levels and the temperature,” Jacobson said.
The new building will add modern climate controls, dimmable lights and air showers to contain more contaminants. The facility will also have improved energy efficiency by recirculating 80% of the heat used in the curing process.
In the 1990s-era paint bays, air was passed through water instead of a filter to be cleaned, creating contaminated water, Jacobson said. The decommissioning of the old paint bays will transition the company to a newer form of air filtration.
“This new paint bay, I'd say it's probably a system we've been using for the last 15 years, but definitely some improvements to how much air can be recirculated in the booth,” Jacobson said. “It's definitely a newer system for painting.”
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