Friday, January 8, 2010
GREENSBORO — The company that will train pilots to fly Honda Aircraft Co.’s new corporate jet has agreed to train some of those pilots here.
FlightSafety International will put its first simulator inside Honda’s plant, which is under construction at Piedmont Triad International Airport. The simulator will begin training pilots in December 2011, just as the first customers take ownership of the new jets.
The company will benefit from a sales tax exemption on flight simulators that North Carolina lawmakers passed last summer.
The simulators can range in price from $8 million to $12 million. When the legislation passed, state Commerce Department officials estimated the exemption would cost the state up to $128,000 in one-time revenue.
Greensboro was competing with several other locations where FlightSafety has training operations, including Atlanta. Georgia passed a similar tax break early in 2009.
“We wanted those dollars to stay in North Carolina and that exemption was the best way to do that,” said Dan Lynch, president of the Greensboro Economic Development Alliance.
Although the state will lose the one-time sales tax on the simulators themselves, the airport will gain from 25 to 30 jobs a simulator. All pilots, co-pilots and chief mechanics will have to be trained before they’re allowed to operate one of the jets. And those pilots will also have to return for annual retraining, Lynch said.
State and local developers have been trying to build up Greensboro’s aviation sector, building on the presence of companies like HondaJet and FedEx. Lynch said local leaders had spoken with other areas that had developed aviation clusters.
“To a person, they would encourage us to try to get a flight safety operation in Greensboro. That is a key component of the infrastructure,” Lynch said.
FlightSafety is the largest such company in the world, according to its spokesman. It has 40 training centers and trains 75,000 people every year.
Formed in 1951, the company is owned by Berkshire Hathaway and trains pilots for other aircraft companies such as Gulfstream and Cessna.
Local economic development officials hope that this first flight simulator will build into a training base for other companies’ products.
There has been some hope on the part of economic developers that FlightSafety would put two HondaJet simulators in Greensboro.
But company officials said they were unsure where their second simulator would be located.
“We’re not sure exactly where it’s going to be located at this point,” said FlightSafety spokesman Steve Phillips. “It will probably be in Europe but that’s still to be determined.”
The location, he said, would be determined by customer demand.
Asked if the sales tax break helped lure the company, Phillips said it did.
“That was certainly a factor,” Phillips said.
Passing the tax break was a priority for the Guilford County legislative delegation and drew the support of Gov. Bev Perdue’s administration. Commerce Secretary Keith Crisco lobbied for the measure, even appearing at an ad hoc committee meeting called on the floor of the House during the last minute rush to pass bills before the end of session.
Perdue herself traveled to New York to meet with company officials, Lynch said. Lynch and Crisco met with company officials at the Paris Air Show in June.
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