While construction is underway for Clay Lacy Aviation’s third FBO at Waterbury-Oxford Airport in Connecticut, the Van Nuys, California-based business aircraft services company is also working toward building up its maintenance capabilities there.

“Oxford is in its infancy stage,” Clay Lacy senior v-p of product line support Ed Mirzakhanian told AIN. “They’ve got 25 technicians in the repair station. We’re investing heavily in tools every year. Our capital expenditures are hundreds of thousands of dollars plus facilities. So we’re continuing to expand our capabilities.”

With full-service Part 145 facilities at Van Nuys Airport and McClellan-Palomar Airport near San Diego, Clay Lacy established its Oxford operation in 2016 with the acquisition of Key Air, an aircraft management and charter company. As part of the acquisition, the company retained 11 managed aircraft and a small maintenance operation comprising three staff.

“Our initial focus was the managed aircraft that were based out of there—and that’s how Clay Lacy Van Nuys got started, just by supporting the fleet of aircraft we were managing,” Mirzakhanian said. “Obviously, the opportunity grew to working on other transient aircraft.”

As work there increased, the company pursued a Part 145 certificate for Oxford, which it received in 2020. “We are working very closely with our avionics partners to be able to get authorizations for Oxford so they can do some installations, heavy mods, and so forth,” he explained. “That’s probably not going to be for another year, a year and a half or so.”

Clay Lacy’s Van Nuys and San Diego facilities are authorized service centers for Honeywell, Collins Aerospace, Garmin, Gogo, and more recently Viasat. “Hopefully we’re going to start our first Viasat Ka installation this month,” Mirzakhanian said, which will be on a Gulfstream jet.

The Van Nuys and San Diego locations also serve as an authorized service center for Embraer, he noted, adding that the company has the capability to maintain on all manner of business jets but especially Bombardier, Dassault Falcon, and Gulfstream models.

Once construction is completed on the FBO’s first phase at Oxford in 2024, the maintenance team there will have a more permanent space to work from, because they currently operate from leased space at the Atlantic Aviation FBO.

In the meantime, the company’s MRO operations have been robust, even during Covid. “Business has been super busy,” he said. “Between our managed fleet and some transient work, the shop has been full. Our facility was full nonstop through Covid. We probably ran more hours through the shop than we have ever run the first year of Covid.” Even now, Mirzakhanian added, “there are times we are turning work away because of the overlap.”