Aircraft Maintenance Company To Create 85 Jobs, Invest $12.8M in Greensboro Expansion
Apr. 17—GREENSBORO — TAT Piedmont Aviation is set to invest $12.8 million and create 85 jobs in an expansion of its operations near Piedmont Triad International Airport.
The aircraft maintenance company will add test equipment, production tooling and new machinery at its facility at at 7102 Cessna Drive. Pay for the new positions will vary, with an expected average wage of $51,706, according to a news release on Monday from Gov. Roy Cooper.
TAT Piedmont is a Greensboro-based subsidiary of TAT Technologies, which is based in Israel and controlled by FIMI Opportunity Funds, an Israeli private-equity fund, according to TAT Technologies' website. Company officials could not be reached for comment.
A performance-based grant of $200,000 from the One North Carolina Fund will assist TAT Piedmont's expansion. Previously approved incentives of about $139,000 from Guilford County and about $126,00 from Greensboro will count as the required local match for the grant, according to the state department of commerce.
The announcement came hours before the Greensboro City Council was scheduled to hold a public hearing on whether to offer incentives to attract a $50 million, 250-job maintenance facility from U.K. aerospace manufacturer Marshall Aerospace USA LLC. It also comes amid a much larger and longer trend of development around the airport and an ongoing local effort to attract aviation-related businesses.
"We are able to plant this flag as an aerospace hub of the South, if you will," said Marvin Price, the Greensboro Chamber's executive vice president for economic development.
PTI already has a FedEx cargo-sorting hub, HAECO maintenance facilities, HondaJet manufacturing operations, as well as other aviation companies on its campus, and Boom Supersonic is building a supersonic jet manufacturing facility at the airport, with plans to create 2,400 jobs by 2032.
John H. Boyd, a global site-selection expert with The Boyd Co. of Boca Raton, Fla., said that — even more than with industries like pharmaceutical and biotech — aerospace companies tends to cluster when making location decisions, due to the very specific skills needed and required.
TAT Piedmont has been operating for six decades and specializes in maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for auxiliary power units, landing gears and machining and plating, according to the governor's news release. Customers include Boeing, Airbus, Gulfstream, Delta Airlines, and FedEx, among others.
"With our extensive history in North Carolina and especially Greensboro, we are excited to be able to announce our next growth initiative here in 2023," Marty Cervellione, general manager of TAT Piedmont, said in the governor's news release.
Guilford County and Greensboro each approved the incentive funds for the company back in November 2021, with the company looking at multiple possible US locations for the investment, according to Price.
When the incentives were approved, the total investment was expected to be $13.8 million, but with the same number of expected added jobs and expected average salary. At the time, the company employed 115 people at its facility.
J. Leslie Bell, director of Guilford County's economic development department, explained that the incentives are performance-based. He says a county attorney would now draw up a contract with TAT Piedmont, specifying how the money would be given out, a bit each year for four years, contingent on the company creating and keeping the jobs and making the investment.
Local leaders wound up waiting more than a year after approving those incentives for Monday's announcement that TAT Piedmont was choosing to go ahead with the project and locate it here.
"I think it's great," Bell said. "Bringing jobs to the Piedmont Triad area, I think it speaks to the assets that the county already has."
Those assets, Bell said, include the local transportation network, the people, and the cooperative efforts going on among the chamber of commerce, local governments, and others, to try to secure these advantages.
Price said he also agreed with a point made in the governor's press release, about how state investment in workforce training for the aerospace industry is paying off.
"You can't win these kind of projects if you don't have anyone who can work there," Price said. He called Guilford County Technical Community College's aerospace education offerings, "the secret sauce" and "one of the best in the country."
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Reporters Kenwyn Carrana and Richard Craver contributed to this story.
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