‘Tis the Season N ow that winter’s in full swing, Aviation Business Journal caught up with some of the snowiest, coldest, and iciest East Coast FBOs among NATA’s mem- bership to look at best practices in deicing and winter preparations. Heritage Aviation’s home in South Burlington, Vermont, is so synonymous with winter that Burton Snowboards’ founder Jake Burton Carpenter and his wife, current CEO Donna Carpenter, are among the regulars. The FBO serves as home base for the Cessna Citation Sovereign that the Carpenters use to help shuttle VIP team members like Shaun White, as they follow the best snow around the world. But the FBO is as known for its ice as its snow, and while Vermont may be a snow sports capital, winter in South Burlington does present certain challenges. “Deicing is a year-round sport here,” said Benjamin Myer, Heritage Aviation’s Director of Sales & Marketing. “We like to say that we only spray eight months out of the year—only!—then we take a week- end off in May before spending the remaining four months preparing for the next winter season. By June we’re already deep into training, retrain- ing, updating all of our checklists, and doing preventative maintenance on all our trucks. Because of the sheer volume of ice we see here, it’s truly a year-long struggle.” “One of the most important things we’ve done is to standardize all our BY COLIN BANE Best Practices on Winter Preparation and Deicing equipment,” Myer said. “We’ve gone to a completely standardized fleet in recent years, and it’s already saved us a ton of headaches. That’s my first piece of advice: just buy the whole fleet, because you get the benefits of economies of scale upfront and as you order parts and maintain your fleet; and it simplifies everything from maintenance to training to safety. The last thing you want is someone out there getting confused because one truck, or set of equip- ment, is different from the next.” Even more important, Myer said, is investing in his team. He boasts that the average deicing techni- cian on the line at Heritage Aviation has 15 years of experience; each of them goes through the same annual in-house training, airline supple- mental training, and NATA Safety 1st training as his newest recruits. “The people make the job for you, and that’s the first place to make investments when you want your winter to go right,” he said. “I’d say our improvements in winter prep have all been incremental: rethinking personnel placement, getting the right teams together, expanding our train- ing programs... things like the NATA Safety 1st training have been essential for us. We’d be nowhere without it! And what we’ve learned, over and over again, is that, if you’re willing to spend the money to recruit, train, and keep good people, then they’ll take care of the business for you. We have people who’ve worked 20 to 30 years with us, every winter, whom we trust implicitly. Deicing is inherently dan- gerous. It’s cold, obviously. A lot of the time you’re out there in the dark. It’s noisy. You can’t see anything. And there’s zero margin for error, so you have to get the training right, the safety right, the people right.” In January 2016, Heritage took that philosophy a step further, transitioning to an employee owner- ship arrangement. Myer said he can already see the difference: “Now that everyone has some real skin in the game, an actual stake in it, it’s added an extra half-step hustle all around because, at the end of the day, we’re all beholden to the com- pany and its success, and you notice it especially on the coldest of morn- ings. These guys are out there in -20 degrees at 4:30 in the morning, but they know the profits we make off this operation; and that they’ll be sharing in those profits... it makes the guys warmer, for lack of a better word, in terrible conditions. They know they’re getting paid for the extra hustle and extra hassle, and it makes everybody work harder.” The team at Heritage Aviation doesn’t like to make a lot of proce- dural changes during the winter. Instead, employee input on system improvements is collected throughout the season and reviewed in May. “It’s never big changes—we like to think we have a lot of the big problems figured out by now—but, when we ask our team how we can do better, it almost always leads Continued on page 28 Aviation Business Journal | 4th Quarter 2016 27
