When Larry Wade,president and partners of Golden Isles Aviation at McKinnon-St. Simons Island Airport in Saint Simons Island, Ga., wanted to make changes at his FBO, he decided the best option was to go ground up.
Customers at Golden Isles run the gamut from student pilots in a 150 to a Gulfstream 650 jets, Wade said. A popular leisure destination in the south, Saint Simons Island is also renowned for golf and is home to several professional golfers who utilize the FBO.
Wade said Golden Isles old terminal was an old county terminal renovated years ago. The FBO had a good reputation for good service, but the company wanted to improve what they offered customers.
“It was a good facility. We kept it nice, we kept it clean, but it wasn’t in the design, nor was it designed inside that facility how I wanted the facility to flow,” Wade said. “Also, I just wanted to provide what I thought were greater amenities to our guests.”
A total teardown
Golden Isles tore down its old terminal and rebuilt it from the ground up. Hangars were reskinned, reinsulated and painted the same colors and branded for the FBO and the fuel farm was replaced. All the parking lots were also replaced and new landscaping was added.
“Our street is a busy street that goes by the FBO, so we wanted to be nicely lit at night, aesthetically lit in terms of landscaping and the buildings,” Wade said. “We wanted people to drive by the airport and say ‘that looks nice’ instead of ‘oh, there’s the big, ugly airport in the middle of the island.”
Wade said the new terminal building is designed to resemble a nice southern home. It includes a wraparound porch with rocking chairs and table where people from the general public can also come and watch the ramp operations.
Fireplaces are located inside the terminal along with a full kitchen and bistro seating. A practice putting green is located in the terminal, as well.
“I wanted to represent where we live,” Wade said. “I wanted to be a great front door to our community, which I think the FBO is.”
Wade said they decided to not include a restaurant in the terminal upgrades or the hotel because of the abundance of good eateries on the island.
“We’d rather feature them and offer the transportation to get there than to try and compete with them,” he said.
The pilot’s lounge is designed to look like a nice family room with nice home furniture. Sets of golf clubs are kept on site and the FBO offers pilots access to its membership at a local golf club.
“The pilots just pay the cart fee and we can set them up for golf,” Wade said.
While Wade said a lot of the amenities offered at the new FBO come from years of experience in the industry, he said he always takes an outside-the-box approach when thinking about service.
“I think we can keep ourselves inside-the-box and ask what does the rest of the industry do and we all follow each other,” he said. “If you get yourself outside the box and ask yourself what could it be? What do you want it to be?
“Think outside the box and I guess nothing is unfair.”
Golden Isles moved its operations into one of its hangars, which has about 3,000 square feet of office space during the construction of the new terminal, Wade said. They created an atrium inside the hangar and added glass doors so you could see onto the ramp.
The inside was decorated with antique cars and planes as well.
“We renovated that office space for what would work well as the temporary FBO but also after we're done in there,” he said.
A major portion of the upgrade included the addition of a Hilton Home 2 Suites at Golden Isles Aviation to provide lodging in an area where Wade said there’s a challenge getting rooms.
“Beforehand, the thought of it was that I would love to offer our guests not only good service, but facilities and amenities that I thought they would enjoy,” Wade said. “There’s a difference between serving what our customers’ needs are and, right close behind, is being able to deliver an enjoyable experience.”
The hotel is open to both customers and to the general public. It includes a wing-shaped pool with tile resembling airflow over the wing. The pool overlooks the ramp and includes and shares how planes fly in the walkway to the facility.
“People say ‘we’ve seen Delta, we’ve seen Southwest, but we’ve never seen general aviation because where we live, we just don’t go to the general aviation airport, so we don’t know these planes and we don’t know this industry,” Wade said. “So we’ve given away thousands of balsa wood airplanes, we’re developing a coloring book for kids to have.”
The addition of a hotel doesn’t work for a lot of general aviation airports and FBOs, Wade said, but Golden Isles is located in the midst of the island where there’s an abundance of travelers and a need for another flag hotel like Marriott or Hilton.
“I think if you’re building a hotel and only expecting your aviation public to use it, you may find yourself in trouble,” Wade said.
Wade said the addition of a hotel onsite didn’t impact FBO operations. The buildings are nestled together and attached by a porte-cochere
“Airports are such no trespassing, stay out, not admittance type of places, so people feel they can’t get close to them,” Wade said. “We want them to get close to it here and for kids to see aviation.”
While the hotel has been successful, and it’s difficult to get a room, Wade said there’s hope of landing more aviation groups like the Bonanza Society or Cessna Pilots Association to the airport with the lodging onsite.
“I can’t think of any other place where you can come and stay at the hotel at a general aviation airport,” he said. “You can bring in the group, they can look out over the ramp, they can see their airplanes, they can meet down at the ramp, they can all kick tires and tell lies about their flying or whatever and they can go down to the event space and have a banquet there, they can have meetings or whatever.
“They can do it all right here at the airport without ever leaving.”
“I’m not trying to make it different for anybody else,” Wade said. “I’m just trying to me it the best for our customers.
Building from scratch
AV8 Partners is taking a fresh approach to its new Kona Jet Center at Ellison Onizuka International Airport (KOA), which is expected to open in 2020.
Matthew Clayton, CEO of AV8 Partners, said the company secured a 55-year ground lease near the south end of the terminal at the airport in January 2018. The company started development on the 20 acre site this year.
“This is the last property left at that side of the airport for private GA,” he said. “There’s nothing there right now, so we’re starting from scratch.”
Clayton said the first phase of the project will create new ramp space on about 5 acres of land to address congestion issues at KOA. Then they will create a new 6,000 to 7,000 square foot terminal.
The Kona Jet Center will also include a new 36,000 square feet hangar capable of holding the new Bombardier Global 7500 model. Clayton said jet owners have come into KOA and would reposition their aircraft due to lack of amenities like hangars, which he said they want to address with the new facilities.
“We’re seeing some tourism numbers in Hawaii that the average stay is between seven and 11 days,” he said. “So that’s how long those aircraft are on the ground when they’re visiting their homes.”
The last component will be a stand-alone fuel farm with above ground tanks with the capacity to start at two 25,000 gallon Jet-A tanks, with the capability of adding a third.
“I think it’s very challenging on a piece of property, wherever your leasehold is, to start construction and renovations and continue on with your business, we all know that’s a real challenge in this industry,” he said. “We feel this was the only way to go for us, to start with a blank slate and then move from there to design exactly what we needed and what we feel the market needs for the growth and the current amount of landing there right now.”
Clayton said the clients coming into the airport are mostly guests and homeowners in the area, which includes some of the most prominent business leaders in the U.S.
“For a lot of them, this is their second, third, fourth home, so we’re seeing a lot of private jets come in there,” he said. “It’s seasonal, but we’re seeing 750 to 800 landings per year and it seems to be steadily growing at somewhere between three to five percent per year.”
Clayton said the FBO will have a local design with a Hawaiian feel. The terminal will be one level, with a 28-foot atrium to give the facility a great feel for the area.
He said they wanted it to feel like guests are coming into a hotel by using wood and vegetation and landscaping.
“We want a warm feeling, we want people to feel like they’re coming home,” he said. “The motif, the design and all of that will be that ‘aloha feel’ for making guests welcomed.”
Fixing a space issue
Silverhawk Aviation at Lincoln Airport in Lincoln, Neb., offers charter services, maintenance and avionics service along with FBO services. Mike Gerdis, president of Silverhawk Aviation, said the company was looking at all of these aspects while planning updates to their facilities in the company goal of being the best in the Midwest.
The company realized it needed more space to grow its avionics services. It’s also adding a fractional program on its charter services and expanding its fleet, meaning even more space was necessary to meet these goals.
And on top of it all, the Lincoln Airport was out of space.
“The only way for us to keep on building the company was to build a new hangar,” Gerdis said. “Similarly, on the FBO side, as we’re looking to be that best in the Midwest, it was just time to make the lobby and the rest of our building fit the level of service that we were already providing.”
The FBO lobby needed an update and there were challenges with space in the main area of the terminal, Gerdis said. An office was removed to clear up space and free up the area. The pilot lounge was also updated and expanded.
“Basically, the overall look and feel that we were going for is that it’s upscale while being welcoming, comfortable and memorable,” he said. “Those were the four criteria we applied to all of the design choices were making.”
The upstairs area of the FBO lacked sufficient office space, which Silverhawk leaders also wanted to address.
“We used to have a flight school located inside of our building,” Gerdis said. “They ran out of room and so did we, so they’re building their own new facility and that allowed us to really reconfigured a lot upstairs to add some new offices that we didn’t have room for before.”
Gerdis said the FBO worked with Align Design on the concept for the FBO. Silverhawk also surveyed other FBOs across the country they liked and determined how they could incorporate the same elements.
The updates were divided into sections while updates were undertaken to limit the impact on operations. Work was also performed during off-hour periods to minimize impact.
It was completed in December.
“Many people moved several times so you could complete one space, move people into temporarily while you got their eventual final home completed,” he said. “So everyone was pretty excited to be at the home stretch of that process.”
“It’s never easy to do a remodel while staying open for business,” Gerdis said.
The remodel cost about $750,000 to complete.
“It was a necessary step for us to take the business in the direction we wanted to go,” Gerdis said.
The new hangar is about 28,500 square feet and includes an attached area where all of Silverhawk’s avionics technicians and management are located.
“When you have maintenance and avionics in the same place you would have a lot of in-and-out,” Gerdis said. “You’d have an airplane in, you’d diagnose it and you’d have to move it out while you were waiting for parts so you could get started on another project. Now we’re not facing that sort of dilemma.”
Gene Luce, vice president and maintenance manager for Silverhawk said the addition of the space frees up congestion issues for technicians and hangar management.
“Especially in the winter,” he said. “You can’t work on the ramp.”
