First Wing Jet Center Sees Avionics as Key to Future Growth
When Eagle Creek purchased the longtime Montgomery Aviation repair station outside of Indianapolis in 2015, the new owner, Matt Hagans, and the leadership team set about to grow the business and lay the foundation for an exciting future. They renamed and rebranded the service center and fixed base operator as First Wing Jet Center, added new aviation services, built an avionics shop, and expanded into turboprop and jet maintenance.
“We were a repair station famous for our piston work, but we were small, only about three or four mechanics,” said Sean White, vice president and general manager of First Wing Jet Center at Indianapolis Executive Airport in Zionsville, Indiana. “In looking ahead, we felt strongly that avionics was going to be a major component of our future. We started an avionics shop under the tutelage of Eagle Creek.”
First Wing dedicated 6,000 of its 20,000 square feet of maintenance space to avionics and hired additional technicians. Today, the service center is an authorized dealer for Garmin, Avidyne, Aspen Avionics, Gogo and L3. Companies operating in and around central Indiana make up a larger segment of First Wing’s business.
“In the beginning, my whole shop had about three people,” White said. “We’re now at 16. We’re five times the size we were when we started five years ago. The avionics shop has gone from zero to five full-time guys focused on avionics. Now, we’re busy with three to five avionics projects at any one point.”
