The new owners of the SJ30 light jet program are renaming their company “SyberJet Aircraft,” shuttering the former owner’s Martinsburg, W.Va. assembly line and moving most of the aircraft’s production tooling to Cedar City, Utah. Although the company has dramatically scaled back its real-estate footprint there, for now the San Antonio, Texas facility will continue to serve as headquarters and provide service and support to the four SJ30s currently flying.

The main 130,000-sq-ft hangar at the San Antonio facility was recently taken over by the Mexican-owned NovaShare Group, currently a provider of Cirrus Aircraft flight training. NovaShare has moved its Cirrus operations into the hangar and intends to install a new FBO there.

SyberJet is renting a section of the hangar. The lease on the SJ30’s San Antonio office headquarters was auctioned as part of the bankruptcy settlement. 

The SJ30 program’s assets were purchased out of bankruptcy from Emivest Aerospace earlier this year by MT, a company affiliated with Metalcraft Technologies, a major SJ30 airframe component supplier. Metalcraft is based in Cedar City. Veteran SJ30 executive Mark Fairchild is remaining with the program as SyberJet’s San Antonio general manager. It appears that the new owners intend to place the aircraft back into production; however, official details remain scarce. In a brief written statement issued June 15, Fairchild said, “SyberJet has a solid operating plan to deliver SJ30s to the world marketplace,” but he did not offer any further details and declined to do so when contacted by AIN.

The four- to five-passenger, transcontinental-range SJ30 light jet was designed by Ed Swearingen in the mid-1980s as the Gulfjet and received FAA Part 23 certification 20 years later in October 2005 as the SJ30. Since the aircraft’s inception, the program has had several different owners, including Sino-Swearingen and Emivest.