A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;in 2007, Curt came to&nbsp;the publication&nbsp;from the broadcast industry where he was a national science and technology television reporter and producer. He writes on the FBO field, aviation finance, and sustainable aviation and occasionally contributes to&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;sister publication&nbsp;Business Jet Traveler. Curt was a member of the AINtv reporting staff that won the 2008 Aerospace Journalist of the Year award for Best Airshow Daily. That same year, he was a finalist for another AJOYA award. He earned an AJOYA for Best Business Aviation Submission in 2018 and was a finalist in that category in 2021. He received the National Air Transportation Association’s&nbsp; Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with&nbsp;Consumer Reports’ television division, CRTV, and for several local television news staffs. An honors graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University in 1995. Curt lives in New York State with his wife and two young sons.

Senior Editor

Curt Epstein

Maine-based MRO provider C&amp;L Aerospace (Booth 1823) announced that its new aircraft paint shop opened earlier this month. The $3 million facility, a conversion of a 17,000-sq-ft existing hangar at Bangor International Airport, can now accommodate an Embraer Lineage 1000, or it can be partitioned to hold a pair of aircraft the size of a Bombardier Global simultaneously.

 


“What we aim is to be a one-stop shop,” said CEO Chris Kilgour, noting that C&amp;L already has received a number of deposits from owners for paint slots. “We’re a maintenance facility, we sell a lot of parts, we have an interior shop that opened about a year ago and now with this paint hangar someone can bring an aircraft here and everything can be done.”

 


This latest addition, which took five months to convert, comes on the heels of a $6 million maintenance hangar project where two other hangars were refurbished and mated with a newly built structure for an overall 120,000 sq ft of maintenance space, capable of handling five or six jobs at once, depending on the size of aircraft.

 


While the company’s Part 145 MRO business had been more geared to airline operations in the past, Kilgour said that C&amp;L is seeing an increase in business aviation traffic. “We want to move further into this market,” he told AIN. “We’re bringing some of the airliner mentality over with us, but at the same time understand that it’s a different platform. Some of the larger operators that we’ve spoken with like the idea of us treating their fleets like an airline where we have the two shifts and we do the heavy maintenance nose to tail.”

 


Kilgour has owned the facility, which currently has a staff of approximately 130, since 2010. For the past two years it has specialized in the overhaul of flight control surfaces for the Hawker 800/850/900 series, having bought part of that business from BBA Aviation’s legacy support division Ontic. “We’ve torn down some Hawker Aircraft, which gave us a good pool of rotables that we exchange out with operators as well,” said Kilgour.

 


C&amp;L can now do heavy maintenance checks on the Hawker 800. It recently completed the installation of a Med Pac medevac system on a Hawker 800A, marking the first time that aircraft was equipped with the system. The process took four weeks and included some modifications, which will allow the twinjet–now serving in Kuwait–to be converted from passenger charter configuration to medevac mode in less than an hour.

C&L Aerospace Positions Itself as One-Stop Shop

The Bangor International Airport-based maintenance and completions facility has just opened a new $3 million paint shop.

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