Air Tractor, Tower collaborate on airplane tent hangar

The collaboration began as a casual conversation between executives at Olney’s two largest employers at Hometown Coffee & Tea and resulted in the construction last week of a giant tent built with Tower Extrusion parts that will solve Air Tractor’s short-term supply chain and aircraft storage problems.

Air Tractor Financial Director Phil Jeske ran into Jake Bailey, Tower’s fabrication manager, last October while grabbing a cup of coffee at Hometown. The two men “were talking about business in general,” Mr. Bailey recalled. Like a lot of businesses these days, Air Tractor was having problems sourcing some parts, but did not want to interrupt its production of agricultural and firefighting planes to wait for those components to come in.

“I said, ‘Are you going to have to store them?’” Mr. Bailey recalled. “I told him, ‘You’re going to have to store them outside.’” Mr. Jeske pointed out that West Texas, with its unpredictable hail and windstorms, was not the best environment to store the planes that cost in excess of $1-2 million apiece.

“We are having a difficult time sourcing some all of the parts to complete our aircraft due to the current supply chain disruptions,” Mr. Jeske said.

“We don’t want to stop building aircraft while we are waiting on a few parts to complete because you can never recover the lost aircraft.”

Then Mr. Bailey recalled a Tower customer called Sunbelt Rentals, which builds huge tents consisting of fabric and an aluminum frame built of Tower’s extruded aluminum parts. Sunbelt Rentals has provided tent hangars for the U.S. Air Force and other aircraft owners. “We either make or source every [aluminum] part on those tents. I proposed talking to my customer about the tent,” he said. Mr. Bailey made the introduction on Oct. 27, and last week, Sunbelt arrived at Air Tractor and began setting up the 131-foot-by-247-foot tent/hangar.

Air Tractor leased additional land at the Olney Municipal Airport to erect the tent and store up to 25 aircraft at a time, Mr. Jeske said.

“The tent would be rented for at least two years and will give Air Tractor a place to store aircraft that were incomplete due to supply chain disruptions,” Mr. Jeske said. “We are hopeful that within a couple of years the supply chain will return to pre-pandemic levels and we won’t need the tent any longer, but if it doesn’t we can extend the lease.”

“It was very nice to find out through a casual conversation with Jake that he had contacts that could get us a temporary facility and it was a bonus that Tower actually produced most of the tent parts,” he added. “It really makes you feel good when one local company can help another. It doubles the positive impact of the project on Olney.”

In addition to its production of ag and firefighting planes, Air Tractor was selected last August by U.S. Special Operations Command to provide up to 75 rugged multi-mission aircraft to “fulfill SOCOM’s need for a deployable, affordable, and sustainable aircraft system for close air support, armed intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and strike coordination missions to counter violent extremist organizations,” the government said in a statement. The Air Tractor planes will be equipped with L3Harris Technologies’ Sky Warden system for the Armed Overwatch program, the statement said.

“Olney has two very unique manufacturers that are industry leaders in their fields, so whenever the two happen to come together for a job it is really unique … that they are able to help each other,” Mr. Bailey said. “It’s near that we were able to help each other but it was a little bit coincidental that they needed something that we make.”