Aug. 02--MASCOUTAH --An audacious, if improbable, proposal for a startup company to build cargo planes at MidAmerica Airport has triggered a mutiny among some St. Clair County officials on how the controversial airfield should be run.
At least several county board members say it's time to pull control from the appointed St. Clair County Public Building Commission, which has presided over a string of ambitious plans that have mostly flopped.
The issue came to a head last month over plans that a company called Covenant Aerospace Inc. put on its website for building mid-size cargo planes at a business park that would adjoin the airport in Mascoutah.
Covenant estimated that such a development would create 2,100 jobs.
For an airport with a reputation as one of the nation's most notorious boondoggles, the business park would mark a major turnaround in its fortunes.
However, county board Chairman Mark Kern said this week that Covenant's plans are "extremely preliminary" and that it remains to be seen whether the company has the wherewithal to pull off its proposal.
Kern said he has met once with Covenant representatives and that the company asked about the value of a 253-acre county-owned tract. That led the building commission to recently approve spending $15,000 for an appraisal.
"Their plan has not been vetted by us, but it made sense to get the land appraised because there have been numerous inquiries over the years about its value," Kern said.
Several of the 29 elected County Board members became incensed at what they asserted was Kern's failure to apprise them of Covenant's plan.
In response, Republicans Ed Cockrell of New Athens and David Tiedemann of Belleville, and Democrats Frank Heiligenstein of Freeburg and Larry Stammer of Belleville, sponsored legislation that would shift control of the airport from the seven-member building commission, whose members are appointed by Kern, to the full county board.
Cockrell said that airport control had been a sore point for him long before the Covenant issue arose.
"I'm sure (the commission) gets pipe dream inquiries like (Covenant's) all the time," he said. "Regardless, we deserve to have the final say before the county hands out another $250,000 to a guy like Hewitt."
He was referring to Wall Street veteran John G. Hewitt, who received $250,000 in cash a few years ago from the commission as incentive for a cargo facility that was never built.
Heiligenstein concurred.
"We realize that, to some extent, certain plans for the airport need to be kept confidential so that (Lambert-St. Louis International Airport) doesn't steal our thunder, but the board is too often kept out of the loop on key airport decisions," he said.
Cockrell and Heiligenstein said that they do not expect their proposal will get enough votes to pass.
Kern denied that he or the building commission withheld information from board members.
The commission meets once a month and airport director Tim Cantwell "gives a presentation at each meeting; county board members are free to attend and ask questions," he said.
He said turning airport control over to the board would be impractical.
"Our airport currently operates with little more than a dozen people, and to give them 29 bosses would be untenable, not to mention inefficient for the businesses now operating at the airport," Kern said.
Those businesses are Allegiant Air, a small airline; North Bay Produce, a wholesale company; and Boeing Co., which has about 100 people doing parts assembly work in an underused hangar.
A different group that's working on a separate cargo project at MidAmerica said the political turmoil isn't making its efforts any easier.
Gary Andreas, a Chesterfield hotel consultant and frontman for Strategic Air Cargo, a group that wants to buy four Boeing 747s and launch a small freight airline out of Mascoutah, said he's still trying to line up financing.
"We're still working on it," he said. "But if you've been noticing what's been happening over there, the politics have reached a new height."
Andreas said he knows little about Covenant's plans -- he's seen a plastic model of their plane but that's about it -- but didn't think it would compete with what his group is planning.
"Their thing is very much a regional play," he said. "You'd bring in air cargo on large aircraft in a major hub, then fly it to smaller airports, like Billings, Mont., or Des Moines, or Frankfort, Ky."
Covenant representatives could not be reached for comment, but materials on their website depict plans for a twin-engine turboprop cargo-only plane called the CA6, with a four-year development plan. The "truck-like" plane would be aimed at serving short-haul freight routes and would be built specifically for cargo.
The plane appears similar to a previous cargo effort, which involved some of the same people. SkyTitan International also had plans to build a regional, cargo-only, turboprop at MidAmerica and, according to its website, had meetings about state incentives with Gov. Pat Quinn in 2011.
One of the people behind Covenant, Dave Bridges, was on SkyTitan's board, and also leads a third firm called Freight Feeder Corp., which has been working on a similar project since 2007. In March, the founder of an older air cargo startup -- Utilicraft Aerospace -- which Freight Feeder bought in 2007, filed a lawsuit in federal court in East St. Louis against Bridges, Freight Feeder and others seeking $2.9 million he says he was owed after leaving the company. That suit is pending.
Financial disputes and local politics aside, building an airplane manufacturer from scratch is no small feat.
The engineering, manufacturing and financial wherewithal needed, plus the competition from established industry giants such as Boeing and Airbus, make any startup in the field a decidedly long shot.
Indeed, noted Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group in Alexandria, Va., a successful new aircraft manufacturer hasn't launched since 1969, when Brazilian plane-maker Embraer got off the ground.
"There are many who've tried and failed," he said.
That's especially true in the market for small, cargo-only, planes, said Robert Dahl, managing director of Air Cargo Management Group, in Seattle. Most of the world's air freight fleet was first designed as passenger planes, and much of the need for small cargo planes is met by converting older passenger jets for cargo.
Those planes come relatively cheap, Dahl said, and conversion is a straightforward process. The long lead time and development costs of building cargo-only planes from scratch often makes them too expensive to compete.
"There is demand for aircraft of this type, but there's a great deal of competition from used equipment," he said. "Putting this tog in a way that makes sense for the (customer) is always a struggle.
It would at least be a good sign, Dahl said, if a major customer -- FedEx or UPS, most likely -- was involved in production or financing of Covenant. But there's no evidence that that's the case.
MidAmerica opened in 1997 with high hopes it would become a passenger reliever for the then-busier Lambert, an economic engine for Metro East and an anchor to secure the future of the adjacent Scott Air Force Base by providing a second runway for the two to share.
One consultant predicted then that the $313 million MidAmerica investment would deliver 20,000 jobs within 15 years. It did no such thing, and after a series of disappointments, it continues to operate at an annual loss made up by taxpayer subsidies.
Tim Logan of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
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