It’s tough for Jeff Lowe to fly his 1979 Beechcraft King Air C90 past an airport that is home to an aftermarket completion center.
As co-founder and president of Aviation Fabricators – or AvFab – he knows each facility is a customer or prospective customer for the interior parts and components his company designs and produces for general aviation, corporate, special missions and commuter aircraft. That’s why even when his wife is with him on a trip to an industry meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, his flight plan from his home in the western Missouri town of Clinton includes touching down in Waco, Texas; Midland, Texas; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“I love to stop in repair shops and completion centers and ask to take the interior folks out to show them our King Air,” Jeff said. “What we’ve done to the interior truly is a transformation.”
Whether during one of those impromptu interior tours or when an operator sits inside the airplane at a trade show, Jeff said it’s not uncommon for the 43-year-old aircraft to be mistaken for the latest King Air C90GT model.
“That’s a pretty good compliment,” said Jeff, who started the business with his father G.R. Lowe in 1978.
The Lowes operated a 1967 King Air A90 from 2000 until 2015, when they replaced it with the C90 with the intention of creating a flying showroom. That same year, AvFab began marketing its extensive King Air interior upgrade options as the AvFabulous package.
Operators can mix and match the available mods or integrate them all; the company’s C90 showcases the entire package. That includes an arm ledge table system, pleated window shades, lateral tracking seat bases, aft jump seat kit, clear view hidden headrests and a lighter, more modern side-facing seat.
Jeff said the upgrade that improves cabin aesthetics and functionality the most is their arm ledge table system that replaces the original recessed table style, giving passengers a sturdier table, four deep cup holders that are accessible at all times and new sidewall panels that incorporate the arm ledge style of the latest production models.
“What’s great is that we offer all of these mods you’ll see on the C90 for the 200 series as well, so a 200 operator can sit in our demonstrator and get a feel for what the mod is going to do to their airplane’s interior,” he said.
Providing solutions for King Airs has been a focus of the business since its start, but AvFab’s scope has expanded to include more than 150 unique STC products and foreign approvals for more than 18 different aircraft models. They could easily choose another aircraft type to outfit as a demonstrator.
“We’ve worked with and around King Airs for nearly 35 years and flown a King Air for 22 years,” Jeff said. “We choose the King Air to operate because we think it’s the safest and the best turboprop platform available that fits our needs.”
Becoming a ‘better pilot’
G.R.’s father was an instructor during World War II for the Civilian Pilot Training program and introduced G.R. to aviation at a very young age. Eventually, G.R. would trade washing airplanes or chores for airplane rides and lessons from a local crop duster. He worked in the oil industry and additionally flew for the company he worked for, while also running a flight school and a single-engine piston charter business when he and Jeff launched their business.
Jeff’s first flight was in his father’s first airplane, a Cessna 170B. G.R., an 11,000-hour pilot, gave him his first flying lesson when Jeff was 15 and continued instructing Jeff through multi-engine and instrument ratings and, recently, his tailwheel endorsement that he earned in November 2021.
Jeff, a 3,000-hour pilot, flew about 350 hours in the past year. Beyond 100 hours in the King Air, he flew a trio of single-engine pistons: AvFab’s six-seat PA-32 Piper Lance, G.R.’s two-place 1945 Aeronca Champ tailwheel and a Cessna 206 he purchased in 2021 for missionary bush flying in Alaska.
“I wanted to get my tailwheel endorsement because it’ll make me a better pilot,” he said. “You get in the King Air, you put some numbers in and it’s so easy to fly. You have got to fly the Champ. It is a great primary; you really feel that airplane when you’re flying it. It’s been great to get in an airplane that burns 4 gallons an hour and fly it as much as I want to sharpen skills.”
The training was helpful for Jeff’s first season as a bush pilot. He is returning again this year with his wife Amber and teenage son Parker, and they plan to spend about four months out of the year there flying for Alaska Village Missions, a non-denominational, evangelical ministry reaching out to 12 villages on the Alaska Peninsula, which stretches 500 miles southwest from mainland Alaska into the Aleutian Islands.
“We go for a month at a time in the months that we can fly a Cessna 206 there,” Jeff said. “It’s where the Bering Sea meets the Pacific Ocean, so the weather is atrocious a fair amount of time especially in the winter.”
The organization has a hub on the peninsula and needs the Cessna because the villages are completely inaccessible by road. Most only have an unimproved airstrip.
“I’d love to have the King Air for the deicing capabilities but most of these runways are too short and can get muddy,” he said.
Jeff is able to take time away from AvFab and turn his responsibilities over to G.R. and Jeff’s 28-year-old son Hayden, who worked summers at AvFab while in school and joined the family business full-time in 2019.
‘There’s got to be a better way’
Jeff and G.R. started in the business in 1978, first selling small parts and salvage as Central Airmotive. They took note of interior items that were no longer supported by the OEMs or were hard to find, along with items that continuously broke.
In an interview for a 2013 article in King Air magazine, G.R. explained how he and Jeff developed their niche.
“We had a very strong clientele with Central Airmotive so we just listened to them,” he said. “One thing Jeff and I learned early on was that there were a lot of shops repairing aircraft but not many of them wanted to repair interior components, especially seats. There are a lot of subtleties involved with seats so it was an area that not many had spent the time to become proficient in. We studied a lot, learned a lot, went through a lot of trial and error. Eventually we began to put it together and learned the intricacies.”
They launched AvFab in 1988 to offer inspection, repair and overhaul of aircraft interior components such as seats, divans, tables, toilets and cabinets in a timely manner. By 1992 they were responding to customer requests to develop and produce custom aircraft seating, parts and components that enhance the value and versatility of an aircraft.
Today, the sister companies employ about 30 in Clinton, where they operate in 95,000-square-feet of space. Visiting completion centers in the King Air has been an important part of growing the business.
“The completion centers are our best research and development team,” he said. “They bring us the issues they’re hearing from the customers and we come up with solutions.”
Like many of their products, AvFab’s most recent King Air interior development started with hearing an operator’s issue and thinking “there’s got to be a better way,” Jeff said.
A missionary group that operates several type of aircraft needed a stretcher for transporting a non-critical care patient that didn’t require reconfiguring the interior and was compact enough that it could be left on the airplane so it was handy in an emergency while traveling in a remote area.
AvFab received TSO approval in October for the STOWAWAY Medical Stretcher Kit, which folds in half for storage in a King Air’s wing locker, as well as cargo pod and baggage areas of other aircraft types.
“As we went through the development process with the STOWAWAY stretcher, we saw that it would have a broader appeal than only the humanitarian market that had presented the problem to us,” Jeff said. “We could see charter, corporate and private operators using it, whether they’re flying into remote areas or they’ve got an elderly family member they’re taking to Florida for the winter. In the King Air, you push it to the front of a wing locker, where you usually don’t use that space, and then you’ve got it with you in case a medical situation comes up. There’s a lot of value there for less than a $10,000 investment.”
Several big King Air projects are in development currently, Jeff said, including a drink rail table system that will modernize a King Air 350 interior to look like the current production 360 model.
“We love trying to find ways to build on what’s already the best airplane,” he said. “We do that with repairs, with mods, with utility enhancements – anything we can come up with interior wise. We make products and repair parts for many other airplanes, but the King Air is our heartbeat.”