'Birthday Present' For Company

It's a big step for the company aiming to reintroduce a storied aircraft name to the US market. Commander Premier Aircraft (CPAC) has been awarded Parts Manufacturer Approval by the FAA.

Joel M. Hartsone, CPAC President and CEO, said, "This is an enormously important milestone for CPAC. It's like a birthday. With this grant, CPAC begins life as an FAA regulated manufacturing company."

The company tells ANN it will start accepting orders for new Commanders within two months. Each new aircraft will take about five weeks to build. The last new Commander rolled out in 2002.

The Commander 115 aircraft to be produced at the Cape Girardeau plant are already fully certified by the FAA, and the company has all equipment necessary for full scale production. This grant gives CPAC authority from the FAA to certify parts for installation and use in Commander aircraft under its own quality assurance program.

"Putting things in the sky is serious business," Hartstone said. "Our senior management team and our directors are all pilots. We take aviation safety very seriously."

Commander parts will initially be made by subcontractors, according to Carl Gull, CPAC Vice President of Operations.
"Our subcontractors produce parts for Commanders using our design specifications and fitting our molds and other tooling to their machines," he said.

Under applicable FAA regulations, CPAC is responsible for the quality of parts made by subcontractors as fully as if the parts were made in their own factory.

"The quality assurance program is based on a very technical, very precisely written manual. It's not sufficient to be understood; you have to be insusceptible of being misunderstood. That's how you prove you're doing everything the way you said you were," Hartstone said.

When production is fully operational, the company hopes employ at least 40 people and "eventually" increase that number to 60.

Hartstone said he receives inquiries from people interested in buying a new plane "virtually every day."  He hopes the deliberate slowness is reassuring to future passengers and aircraft owners.

"We do things very methodically one step at a time," he said. "We want to make sure we're on solid footing with what we've done before we take the next step."

"By first seeking PMA, CPAC can establish a full part sales operation... to support existing and new Commander fleet," said Hartstone, adding CPAC is now "more confident" in its ability to produce new Commander 115 aircraft later this year as a result of the designation.

CPAC was formed by a group of 50 Aero Commander owners who bought the company in bankruptcy proceedings. No new Aero-Commanders have been built since the original company filed for Chapter 7 in 2002

FMI: www.commanderpremier.com