Aero-Flite Inc., a Kingman, Ariz.-based company that recently garnered a big contract to help provide the U.S. Forest Service with next-generation air tankers for wildfire suppression, plans to establish operations at Spokane International Airport.

The Spokane Airport Board in May approved Aero-Flite's assumption of a lease and operating agreement formerly held by JetTech Aerospace for most of an airport-owned, 70,000-square-foot maintenance, repair, and operations facility, formerly referred to as the old Guard hangar.

About a month later, the Forest Service announced that Aero-Flite is one of four companies that has been awarded contracts to provide a total of seven air tankers this year and next as part of a sweeping effort to replace the agency's aging fleet.

Aero-Flite's contract calls for it to provide a British-built, four-engine Avro RJ85 jet converted for firefighting to the Forest Service in 2013. Three other companies each won contracts to provide two aircraft to the agency.

All of the next-generation tankers are turbine powered, can carry at least 2,400 gallons of retardant, and have a cruising speed of at least 300 knots when fully loaded, the Forest Service said. The contracts allow for all four companies to provide additional air tankers to the agency in later years, contingent on funding and other circumstances.

Aero-Flite claims on its website to be the largest private operator of smaller CL-215 water-scooping aircraft in North America, but it also has extensive expertise in aircraft maintenance, engineering, and modifications.

Aero-Flite President and Co-Owner Matthew Ziomek was in Alaska late last week and couldn't be reached for comment. However, Rick Pedersen, senior vice president of Con-Air Group Inc., a big Abbotsford, British Columbia-based company that has an investment interest in Aero-Flite and is familiar with the plans here, says the Spokane operation will be focused initially on the next-generation air tanker program, with the water scooping aircraft to arrive later.

Spokane was picked from a number of locations evaluated by Aero-Flite, Pedersen says, adding, "There's a lot of good things going for it."

Aero-Flite employs around 40 people at its Arizona facility and probably will employ "40-plus" in Spokane, though it remains unclear how many of them will be hired here and how many will be relocated from Arizona, he says.

Spokane Airport Board background documents said Conair had acquired Aero-Flite and that Aero-Flite would relocate here from Arizona. Pedersen says, though, that Aero-Flite remains an independent company, albeit with Conair as an investment partner, and that it's unclear whether Aero-Flite will discontinue its Arizona operations entirely.

Founded in 1963, the company specializes in the aerial suppression of wildfires in the United States and Canada. Its website says it operates and maintains five of the purpose-built CL-215 amphibious aircraft, and that it also offers maintenance services to other aircraft owners on various types of planes.

The hangar in which it began leasing space last month is located on the south side of the airport complex, a short distance west of—and sharing a large apron with—a 41,400-square-foot hangar occupied by Associated Painters Inc., the Spokane-based commercial- and military-aircraft painting company that began operating there two years ago.

Aero-Flite is leasing 31,600 square feet of hangar space, about 27,000 square feet of office and storage space, about a half-acre of parking space, and roughly four acres of ramp space. It agreed to accept all terms and conditions of the JetTech lease and operating agreement, which lasts through Jan. 31, 2029, and includes a Washington state Community Economic Revitalization Board (CERB) loan repayment commitment.

Of Aero-Flite, SIA spokesman Todd Woodard says, "They're a big deal. They're (providing services) all over the country. It's a very good tenant for the airport."

The company typically deploys its water-scooping aircraft from about May through October, and devotes off-season months to working on them, per rigorous maintenance schedules stemming from the extraordinary stresses the aircraft endure while being used to fight wildfires, he says.

Of the company's plan to launch operations here, Woodard says, "I think it's a nice niche for the reason that it utilizes a lot of our existing skilled labor" in aeronautical engineering and related fields, while also placing the company in close proximity to the Northwest's major mountain ranges, among other plusses.

"It's a great base of operation," Woodard says, adding, "I think they're going to be very good for us."

A portion of Aero-Flite's website describing some of the company's capabilities says, "Tactically, our primary strength lies in initial attack—we utilize water sources near a developing fire to quickly knock down the flames and prevent it front spreading into adjacent fuels."

It says, "Our aircraft scoop up to 1,400 gallons of water from a lake or other water source as short as one mile long, and, depending on the distance between the water source and the fire, can deliver as much as 28,000 gallons of water per hour to the fire."

The company says it has the ability to mix foam concentrate with the water while in flight, if customers want to have foam dropped on a fire. In addition, it says it's staffed and has the necessary trucks, trailers, specialized tools, and spare parts to support extended aircraft repositioning and to sustain remote flight operations.

Along with on-call and exclusive-use contract fire suppression services using the CL-215 aircraft, it offers aerial imaging and mapping services, "turnkey" operation and maintenance of customer-owned CL-215s, and engineering and structural repair for a wide variety of other aircraft, its website says.

The company says its maintenance expertise includes performing inspections, making minor and major repairs, and doing alterations.Typical field maintenance activities, it says, include repairs ranging from fixing simple oil leaks and changing out cylinders to replacing engines.

Conair, the Canadian company that's working with Aero-Flite, is a much larger provider of aerial fire-control products and services. It touts itself on its website as "Canada's most experienced specialty aircraft operations provider," serving a variety of national and international customers and partners.

It was founded in 1969 under the name Conair Aviation Ltd as a spin-off of Skyway Air Services, of Langley, British Columbia, its website says. It started with 35 employees and 19 aircraft, specializing as a budworm spraying and aerial firefighting business, and later expanded its reach, focus, and expertise in the latter category.

Still privately owned, Pedersen says it now employs more than 200 people and operates a fleet of more than 50 fixed-wing aircraft from its home base at the Abbotsford Airport in southwestern British Columbia, where it occupies more than 100,000 square feet of hangar space. A 15-employee affiliate operation, Conair France, is located at the Marseille International Airport, inMarignane, France.

This isn't Conair's first business foray at Spokane International Airport. An affiliate company that Conair spun off, Cascade Aerospace Inc., also based in Abbotsford and led by the same board chairman and president and CEO, opened a U.S. offshoot aircraft maintenance and modification facility in the same hangar at Spokane International Airport in early 2009.

To help pay for needed improvements there, it secured a $2 million CERB financing package that included a $500,000 grant and a $1.5 million, 20-year loan at a 1 percent interest rate, and it said that it expected to employ several hundred workers here within five years.

Shortly before Associated Painters' arrival here, Airport Board documents described Associated Painters and Cascade Aerospace as having a "symbiotic relationship," and there were expectations that the two would work closely together.

Woodard says, though, that Cascade was hit hard by the economic downturn, which led it to sell its assets here to a company executive who reorganized the operation under the JetTech Aerospace name.

That company ceased operating at the airport here at the end of May, and Woodard says he doesn't know whether it still is functioning. During its short stint as a tenant there, it attracted some positive industry attention for the specialized work it performed in Boeing Business Jet completions and refurbishing. Messages left through JetTech's still-functioning phone answering system weren't returned.

The CERB loan originally secured for Cascade Aerospace's improvements at the airport was reassigned first to JetTech and now to Aero-Flite, and Woodard says there's been no disruption in loan payments.

Though Cascade Aerospace discontinued operations here, it remains a major aerospace service provider in Canada.

The Forest Service last fall initiated the process to develop and issue the first contracts for next-generation air tankers. In February, the Obama Administration, led by the Forest Service, issued a Large Airtanker Modernization Strategy, and the President included $24 million in the 2013 budget for that purpose.