Nostalgic Flair

EC Source Aviation builds flight department with distinctive aircraft

Just a few months after taking a chief pilot position flying helicopters for EC Source, Tim Brown was promoted to director of aviation. This new title meant that not only would he fly the aircraft in support of the construction of new power lines, he also would manage and build a complete flight department. For the lifelong aviator with experience as a residential and commercial contractor, the job was the perfect blend of aviation and construction.

EC Source (ECS) is headquartered in Mesa, Arizona, with offices in Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Utah and Iowa. It was founded in 2006 to provide heavy equipment leasing services to the energy infrastructure industry and expanded three years later to become a turnkey provider of extra high voltage electrical transmission systems. In 2011, ECS became a subsidiary of MasTec, Inc., a national infrastructure construction company serving the energy, water/sewer/civil, communications and government sectors.

After spending some time evaluating the needs of the company and the flight department, Brown was excited to find that EC Source President Brian Bratton and MasTec management supported his ambitions and ideas. He was able to acquire an additional helicopter and move forward in designing and growing EC Source Aviation to match his vision. Life only got better when the flight department received the go-ahead, in 2014, to add a fixed-wing airplane to the fleet.

Two MD600N helicopters support construction activities and a King Air F90 supports the helicopter operations. “We use the King Air to support crew changes; transportation of needed parts, materials and maintenance personnel; as well as providing VIP transportation to meetings and job sites,” Brown said. The King Air operates out of Glendale, Arizona, and the helicopters operate from either the base in Arizona or remote bases established near projects.
Nearly five years into the job, Brown is proud of the team he has assembled at EC Source Aviation, that the company depends more and more on the aviation division to support a multitude of operations and that his group has one of the best safety records in the industry. He’s also pleased that they are accomplishing all of this with unique aircraft.

“We fly 2000 and 2007 MD600N helicopters and a 1980 Beechcraft King Air F90,” Brown said. “These are older and different than what you’d see in any other flight department.”

A nostalgic flair
Brown was born to parents who met in a flying club in 1957 in Chicago, where his mother and father flew for the Civil Air Patrol. He grew up wanting to fly helicopters like his mother and in 32 years as a pilot he’s accumulated more than 9,000 hours in fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft and acquired ATP ratings in both categories.

“Aviation’s been in my blood my whole life,” said Brown, 52, “and I think that’s why some of this nostalgia sticks to my core. The other reason is expense. Aviation is so expensive. My thoughts are: be humble, be modest. Take care of your gear and it takes care of you.”

That explains why Brown, who has owned several businesses during his career, including a pilot supply shop, drives a 21-year-old truck that looks like it’s in show-room condition. It also explains why his ECS aviation team put the energy and money into revamping a 30-plus-year-old tug. “I could’ve gone out and bought a brand-new, top of the line tug,” he said. “But I bought a 1978 six-cylinder gas engine tug, and now it’s one of the prettiest you’ve ever seen.”

It also explains why Brown purchased a 1980 Beechcraft King Air F90 as ECS Aviation’s first fixed-wing aircraft in 2014.

“I was fortunate that the company is capitalized enough that we could’ve bought whatever we wanted, I just have a hard time spending money we don’t need to spend,” Brown said. “This airplane does absolutely everything we need it to do for less than a quarter of what it would’ve cost to buy a new King Air. It’s nice that we can get what we need done with an older bird.

“Companies get so caught up in buying new, they tend to overlook used aircraft – not just King Airs, but used aircraft in general. You really don’t need to buy new. There are a lot of great aircraft, both helicopters and airplanes, out there in the market that need to be valued and appreciated.”

Building a flight department
Besides nostalgia, Brown has solid business motives to spend money wisely and purchase older aircraft to perform the required tasks. “Other than tax incentives, older aircraft are a better deal and your dollars go a lot farther. That is why we decided to go the route that we did. Our fleet is top of the line and a person would never know the age of our aircraft,” Brown said.

While Brown admits to falling for the look of the King Air F90 when he saw a brand-new one more than three decades ago, he shopped all types of 90-series models on the market in 2014. “As luck would have it, the best one for the best price turned out to be an F90,” he said. “With the F90, anyone who knows their King Airs will look and go, ‘Oh, nice F90.’ It’s kind of an eclectic group – the T-tail, the dual main wheels instead of just the single balloon wheels and the four-bladed props make the airplane look sporty. King Airs are like Corvettes, there are certain years that just stick out.”

According to AOPA, Beechcraft produced about 200 King Air F90s from 1979-1983. The model combined the fuselage and wings of the King Air E90 with the King Air 200’s T-tail.

“McDonnell Douglas only built 82 of the MD600N helicopters, and we operate two of them. They sold thousands of the 500-series airframes, but the 600 is a really unique aircraft; it’s an awesome aircraft. It’s bigger than the 500-series and has more than twice the horsepower, it’s heavier and has six blades instead of four or five blades. It’s the best-kept secret in the industry,” Brown said.

“We fly it because we have more horsepower and better margins for safety and performance; we’re not maxed out on temperature or torques doing what we do – pulling wires or putting buggies on the wire, lifting materials to people in limited-access areas.”

The MD600N helicopters give EC Source a competitive advantage over construction companies that outsource their helicopter-aided construction. “Since we’ve been running a flight department, we can do everything that our vendors were doing and we’ve actually gotten better at it because we custom-made some equipment, tooling and rigging and we’ve been really safe in using it,” Brown said. “In the four-and-a-half years since I’ve been running ECS Aviation, we’ve actually received a reduction in our insurance premiums every year because they believe in our program, our safety protocols and our culture. And, the company’s really happy with the aviation department.”

That happiness shows up in the growth afforded the flight department. When Brown joined the company in 2011, they had one helicopter, one fuel truck, contract maintenance, on-call fuel truck drivers and they rented space in a hangar. Today, they have two helicopters, the King Air, 22 support vehicles (trucks, SUVs, fuel trucks, support trailers, fuel trailers), 15 employees and the necessary infrastructure of tools and specialty equipment to maintain the fleet.

“We built a lot of stuff in-house. It’s custom proprietary equipment to make the maintenance functions go easier and faster, like engine hoists and transmission lifts,” Brown said.

Brown expects to add a third helicopter in the next year or two, and possibly a second fixed-wing aircraft.

A timeless King Air
Typical EC Source projects are brand-new construction and last about two years. The aviation department will rent a hangar at a nearby airport in which to park a trailer, support truck and helicopter for the duration of the job. Routine maintenance for the helicopters and rare, but urgent, AOG situations led to adding a fixed-wing aircraft to the ECS fleet.

“The biggest reason we bought the King Air was to support the helicopters. You get a helicopter on a job and suddenly it doesn’t start. You’re in a field, likely in the middle of nowhere, so what do you do? Grab a mechanic, grab the part, jump in the King Air and fly to the closest airport. Someone meets us with a truck, we drive out to the helicopter, pop in the new part, then everybody goes home,” Brown said. “It’s not only to service the customer by getting the helicopter back to working condition, but also to protect our asset – leaving a helicopter in the open overnight is just not good.”

There are also the instances of scheduled maintenance, when the airplane allows the team to haul all their mechanics and tools, including those that are too heavy or bulky to ship. Or the times an information technology team member is flown to a job site to fix network connectivity or computer issues in the field, saving an 18-hour round-trip drive. Executive travel has become an important role for the King Air, too.

“We had an issue in Utah, and our vice president based in Texas needed to go up there and meet with the customer and some technical advisors,” Brown said. “It was a last minute deal, and trying to get airline tickets just didn’t work with the window that the customers had to meet with our guy. He flew commercially from Houston to Phoenix, drove to Glendale and literally got out of the car, walked through the hangar onto the airplane and we zipped him up to Utah. He made the meeting. If we didn’t have the King Air, we would’ve had to charter an airplane. It was a meeting that he had to attend.

“There are a ton of examples of times the King Air has come through and been phenomenal for us.”
EC Source Aviation expects to fly the King Air F90 about 300 hours per year. The company chose the F90 because of its dependability/reliability, cost of acquisition and direct operating costs. It helped that the 1980 model with 13,000 flight hours wasn’t showing its age.

“Our aircraft is probably one of the nicest high-time King Air F90 models flying today. The paint job was done about a year before we bought it and it’s the new GTi or GTx style, which is one reason it looks so nice,” Brown said. “The interior had been updated in 2007, but the previous operator had it pulled out to do EMS [emergency medical services] work, so when they put the interior back in, it was essentially new.”

The previous owner had recently rebuilt the landing gear and upgraded the old engines to the new PT6-135A engines. ECS had Honest Air, in Boulder City, Nevada, install new Hartzell propellers, conduct phase inspections and tweak small items to make the aircraft safe and efficient. “We are helicopter guys and we are detailed oriented on the little things,” Brown said.

Honest Air, together with EC Source Aviation’s in-house maintenance personnel, maintain the aircraft to FAR Part 135 standards although they operate it under Part 91.

“We’re slowly restoring it. Instead of maintaining what we’ve got, we’re making it better,” Brown said. “The only thing we haven’t really touched is the avionics. We’re probably going to put a couple of different Garmin products in the panel, but as far as the steam gauges go, we’re not going to go crazy. I kind of like the nostalgia of it instead of going to an all-glass cockpit.”