Page 6 - Volume 12, Number 7

Otis Eastern Service LLC started in Wellsville in the 1930s as an eastern division of Otis Engineering Corporation of Dallas.
“My father worked for this company when I was born and later on we came back to buy it together in 1980,” Joyce said.
The family has flown several Beechcraft products over the years, including a Baron to a Queen Air. When their company pilot, Ralph Twombly, died in an accident flying a T-6 Texan at the Reno Air Races in 1994, the family turned to long-term chartering through Luftladder Air Charter. That’s the company Twombly had operated, and it was purchased by John Terrasi, who had flown for the company for years. Through charters, they flew several hundred hours each year mostly on Piper Aztecs and Navajos until 2014.
“In 2014, after the death of my father, we took in an equity partner, Argonaut Private Equity, which allowed us to expand and take care of some estate issues,” Joyce said. “It’s been a great fit and given the pickup in the number of pipelines being built around the country, it was very timely for our growth.”
Otis Eastern remains in Wellsville and is still family operated with the third generation of Joyce – Charlie’s son Casey – now overseeing day-to-day operations as president.
Changes at the business and in the industry prompted the company to get back into aircraft ownership. Executives would now be traveling regularly to visit with Argonaut Private Equity, which is based in Tulsa,
4 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
An aerial view of the Otis Eastern Service LLC headquarters in Wellsville, New York, which is about two hours to the nearest airports with commercial air service (Rochester
or Buffalo).
Oklahoma. Also, the development of hydrofracturing technology has created an uptick in the production of crude oil and natural gas.
“We’re geographically located right in the middle of one of the top three high-growth areas in the United States,” Joyce said. “From the Dakotas to the southwest to Louisiana and Texas to up here in the northeast, these shale developments have triggered a boom in the natural resources industry and made the United States the No. 1 producer of natural gas in the world. We’re going to pass the Saudis as far as oil production very soon.”
As a result, there’s a need to build more pipelines to transport the product. Otis Eastern builds and maintains pipelines that carry oil, petroleum products, natural gas and sometimes other gasses or liquids. They install what are known as transmission lines, which are usually large diameter steel. They work for most of the major transporters that have facilities in the northeast, covering an area bordered in the east from Maine to the Virginias, in the west from Michigan down to Tennessee and all the states in between.
Growing into the King Air 200
For the Argonaut Private Equity partners to visit Otis Eastern’s headquarters in Wellsville, they had to take two commercial flights from Tulsa and then make a two-hour drive in a rental car.
JULY 2018