16 Years of Craftsmanship Excellence

By Stephen Hannemann

When most people think of the aviation industry, their minds nearly always gravitate toward Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, Lockheed Martin, and others. Not so when you live in Alaska. Airframes Alaska is the frontrunner in our 49th state! Headquartered in Palmer, Alaska, Airframes is known for their sought-after welded PA-18-style aircraft assemblies, as well as their fabrication of 3 Place and 4 Place Super Cub fuselages outfitting hardy bush pilots around the world.

Founded 16 years ago, Airframes

Alaska was purchased by Sean McLaughlin in 2009. Under McLaughlin’s guidance, Airframes has experienced exponential growth. In 2014 McLaughlin added the legendary Alaskan Bushwheel Inc. to enhance their bush plane frame offerings with a full accompaniment of tires, wheels, tailwheel assemblies, and complete brake packages. Fast forward to the present with the addition of Alaska Tent and Tarp, plus the world-renowned hot tent, Arctic Oven. Rounding out the adventure brand offerings is Northern Sled Works, which makes Arctic grade sleds for extreme hauling across tundra, sea ice, and shale. Together, these premier class products make the most extreme wilderness more accessible, either for work or for the experienced adventurer. Airframes

Alaska employs 110 people in three locations, providing an important contribution to Alaska’s economy, a top priority of CEO McLaughlin.

Airframes Alaska’s core business is supplying the bush plane industry, the aircraft, and their pilots. These durable airplane frames must be rigid enough to be stable in inclement weather yet flexible, and strong enough to routinely withstand landing on inhospitable terrain. Intrepid sky jockeys routinely land on sloped mountainsides and rough, rocky riverbeds – places that defy logic.

Frequently these well-crafted, ultralight steel frames are Airframes Alaska fuselages adorned with a full accompaniment of Alaskan Bushwheel accessories.

The Airframes

Light, strong, and stable are the criteria for withstanding the rigors these aircraft will face daily. Alaskan Airframes fuselages are created from several sizes of strong, thin walled, lightweight 4130 chromoly tubing. Both rounds and square are used depending upon structure application to create a durable unit. Stringers running the full length of the fuselage are clamped to precision jigs. Then a constellation of strengthening crossmembers are cut and painstakingly contoured to fit the mating tubes in strategic locations before being TIG welded in place. The framework for the landing gear is added with the same attention to detail. From start to finish the production process is approximately 2 1/2 weeks. Those who perform this all-critical work are artisan craftsmen of the highest order.

Additional Components

With the acquisition of Alaskan Bushwheel Inc in 2014, Airframes added a growing revenue stream. Uncommonly flexible tubeless tires, ranging from the 35” Jumbo tires to the 11” Baby Bushwheels were added to their ever-expanding catalog. All tires are made in house by gifted technicians. A full accompaniment of wheels, brake systems, and tailwheel assemblies are available to accommodate all tire configurations, matched for specified requirements. Whether you are looking to upgrade from standard tube-type tires, outfitting your light sport aircraft, or converting to the ultimate go-to bush tires, Airframes Alaska has you covered.

Also available at the Airframes candy store, you can find landing gear to fit most every environmental condition. Performance PSTOL flap kits and hardware are available for short landings and take-offs, critical assets when navigating unfriendly terrain. Light weight and strength are critical on these specialized parts. Airframes also offers strut sets, and replacement struts in their arsenal. Together these components provide the complete package for those adventuring into the wild!

Airframes’ Customers

The fuselage frames, accompanied by many Airframes and Bushwheel supplied components, journey to destinations worldwide. Some go to enterprising individuals to finish their own airplanes in their garages or hangars. Many go to experienced plane builders including Kirk Ellis of K Air, Terry Holliday of Holliday Aircraft Services, and Steven Williams of Acme Cub. When finished these planes go to owners or pilots who deliver supplies to remote work camps. They ferry adventurous sportsmen to otherwise inaccessible hunting and fishing grounds to score that elusive trophy. Or some are just flown for fun, attending fly-ins and competitions with an eye on beating the current world record for the shortest takeoff and landing – a mere 9 feet 5 inches! No matter the purpose, every time one of these specially outfitted planes takes off, they fly away to a new experience.

While the big players in the aircraft industry suffered major setbacks in recent years, Airframes Alaska made substantial gains. Airframes’ supply chain manager Dustin Murray contends small plane owners continued to move around largely unaffected during the pandemic. “We grew overall nearly 50%, partly because of our diversification, but mainly because of the support of our great suppliers and vendors. With their planning, strategic buying decisions, and maintaining adequate material inventory levels, they kept us supplied and producing. They held costs down as best they could; lead times went out in some cases, but we were always able to deliver to our customers.” Having what their customers needed, when needed, has been a huge advantage to growing their business.

Diversification, leadership, and dedicated employees are at the core of Airframes Alaska and their phenomenal track record. To learn more about this superior company, visit: www.airframesalaska.com or to contact them regarding products and employment opportunities: email info@airframesalaska.com or call 907-3314480.

To Create Better Job Pipelines In Colorado, Employers Say Schools Must Reemphasize Trade Skills

When Encore Electric officials travel the state looking to recruit upcoming high-school graduates, they take with them ELMER — the Encore Learning and Mobile Escape Room in which students must connect four electrical circuits to power things and then get free.

It’s not necessarily the kids who think the challenge is fun that Encore looks to recruit, or the ones who blow through it quickly. Instead, it’s the ones who come back three and four times while the room is parked at a school, seeing if they can improve their time and figure out a trick to powering up a lamp or powering up a three-way switch that they hadn’t gotten before, explained David Scott, director of human resources.

That’s because Encore holds a position shared by many employers in the electrical contracting, manufacturing and other blue-collar sectors — Colorado students aren’t getting the education these days needed to prepare them for the trades or being encouraged to go that way. And as state leaders seek to build the manufacturing industry again in this state and to create more pathways from school to careers for Colorado students, Scott believes they need to stop the decades-long push for everyone to go to college and explain what trades can do.

"It is my personal mission to elevate the trades to be valued the same as someone who graduates from college,” Scott said. “I’ll stop when colleges who have signing days for college football players also have signing days for people who want to join the trades.”

A survey released by the Colorado Chamber of Commerce found that 68% of respondents were satisfied with Colorado’s workforce — a general level of pleasure that spread across industries. The outlier, however, was the manufacturing sector, where a full 52% of employers expressed issues with the talent pipeline coming from state educational institutions.

In interviews, executives with companies looked for laborers who don’t need four-year degrees echoed a similar refrain: If students aren’t being actively discouraged from pursuing careers that don’t require at least a bachelor’s degree, they certainly aren’t being encouraged. And that is making it more difficult for a sector of the economy that produces good-paying jobs and supplies needed durable goods to the state and the country to be able to recover from this most recent Great Resignation of workers leaving their jobs.

During the 2022 legislative session, elected officials passed three bipartisan laws seeking to align post-secondary programs of both four-year and community colleges with the needs of employers, to match talent with the fields where it’s needed in this state. One of the measures focused specifically on creating stackable credentials that allow students to have their on-the-job training and previous experience count toward degrees, which could help workers wanting to move up to supervisory trade positions or even encourage them to start in those fields.

But employers said that while closer alignment with educational institutions that can help to train their workers is needed, an even more dramatic shift in overall attitude toward the trades is needed to re-route students into needed professions

BreeAnne Glasmann — talent acquisition manager for windowcoverings manufacturer Hunter Douglas, which has a factory in Broomfield — noted that her company largely is willing to bring in applicants without specific skills and train them on machine operations. Still, it’s struggled in the past two years to remain full-staffed, and when it has gone looking for a skilled laborer, its struggles have been even greater, such as a search for a jour- neyman electrician to work with its HVAC system, which took nine months to fill because of a lack of applicants.Glasmann said Hunter Douglas worked to build a manufacturing-education program with Front Range Community College but found little interest from students in using it. She believes that manufacturing, once viewed as a preferred alternative for many students, is so downgraded in the minds of younger generations that it will take a reorientation rather than the offering of a few classes to move people back to the profession.

“I think part of the problem is that it’s not even in high school. You have to get kids who are in elementary school these days to get them off the college track,” Glasmann said. “We don’t do enough to educate young people on what all career paths there are. It’s such a big societal shift.”

Scott of Encore Electric agrees, saying that he too often hears the trades described as a fallback career for kids who don’t do well in college. He’d like to see it be placed on par with college early in the educational process, like a recent job fair that Adams County offered for 8th graders in which his team got to pitch the benefits of electrical contracting to kids who like working with their hands and using logic to figure out how to get things working.

By Ed Sealover – Denver Business Journal

Colorado-based Maxar lands job making more SiriusXM satellites

Colorado aerospace company Maxar Technologies is extending its run building satellites for media company SiriusXM, winning a project to build hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of orbiters for the radio and telematics company.

Westminster-based Maxar and New York City-based Sirius XM Holdings Inc. agreed to a deal under which Maxar will build two more satellite radio and car services satellites scheduled to launch in the second half of this decade.

Those satellites add to the SXM-9 and SXM-10 satellites SiriusXM hired Maxar last year to build, expecting those satellites to launch in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

“This agreement, in combination with SXM-9 and -10 ordered last year, shows one of Maxar’s greatest strengths — the advantage of performance at scale,” said Chris Johnson, Maxar’s senior vice president of space, in a deal announcement.

“These satellites will provide more capability to SiriusXM’s fleet, including an expanded service area and higher service quality.”

The SXM-11 and SXM-12 satellites are described as twin digital audio transmitters, slated to position themselves in orbit nearly 22,000 above the northern hemisphere.

They, and the SXM-9 and -10, satellites represent a third generation of satellites for SiriusXM, which are more powerful.

“This investment reaffirms our commitment to satellite content delivery systems and cutting-edge technology,” said Bridget Neville, SiriusXM’s senior vice president of satellite and terrestrial engineering and operations.

Maxar, through the 2012 acquisition of satellite builder Space System Loral, has been hired to build 13 SiriusXM satellites to date.It manufactures satellites at its campuses in Palo Alto and San Jose, California.

Neither SiriusXM nor Maxar Technologies have revealed how much the satellite radio pays Maxar for the communications satellites. But what is publicly known about the orbiters suggests the four-satellite work Maxar is starting on will top $900 million in value.

The satellite radio company had two satellites made by Maxar launch for it in the last year, though the first of them, the SXM-7 satellite put into orbit on Dec. 13, 2021, malfunctioned and never went into service. The SXM-8 satellite launched last June and successfully went into service in September, the company said.

More than 150 million vehicles in the U.S. and Canada are equipped to receive signals from the SiriusXM satellites, the company says. SiriusXM also offers satellite-delivered marine and aviation weather and data services to pilots and boaters transmitted to cockpit receivers.

SiriusXM reported having 34 million subscribers to its service at the start of this year. It generated nearly $6.1 billion in 2021 subscriber revenue from its satellite service. That means satellites handle services connected to 70% of the company’s $8.7 billion total revenue last