4 Piedmont General Aviation Group's new $1.9 million hangar/ office complex, located at Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem, is nearing completion. The 27,600- square-foot hangar (at left) which will house from 18 to 24 aircraft will be completed in August, and the 14,400 square feet of office space (far right) will be ready for occupancy in early September. continued from page I Florida network at our stations as well as crew members contacted us frequently to tell us about the types of service needed in the Florida marketplace. “In our estimation, no other region in the country has greater need for service than these Flori da communities.” James also pointed out that Florida, now the seventh most populous state in the nation, is ex pected to move to fourth place in the next few years. "There is also no question that our new presence in Florida will significantly help our competitive posture among those airlines who compete for Florida traffic up and down the east coast.” James added. This major expansion will mean a significant increase in our Flori da payroll — well over $20 million by next spring — and will include: • Establishment of a crew base of 250 pilots and flight attendants at Miami. • The addition of 250 reserva tions agents at our Orlando Reser vations Center where 106 people are presently employed. • The addition of more than 500 new employees at the 10 air ports we will serve in Florida on October 1, for a total of 1,000 new hires on the first phase of the ex pansion. We now have almost 500 employees in Florida. Howard also said that the 56 flights to be added October 1 will be the first of a three-phase ex pansion program. "We will significantly increase both the number of intra-Florida nights and the number of com munities served by Piedmont in Florida in mid-December and then make another expansion in the Spring of 1985,” Howard said. "When our plans for October 1 are combined with our existing intrastate flights and our plans for December, we expect to offer close to 100 daily intra-Florida jet flights by December 15.” Piedmont began service to Florida seven years ago with a SDF's new landside terminal building opened June 30. The building houses ticketing, bag gage makeup and claim, and passenger check-in, and in our new facilities we have twice as much space for passenger serv ices as we did in the old termi nal. The new concourse for passenger boarding and air craft parking will open in about three years. Above: Agent Don Browning checks in a passenger at our new ticket counter. At right: Station Manager Bob Smith shows off the central section of the new terminal. Piedmont employs 78people at SDF, 65 station personnel and 13 in maintenance. We have 12 daily departures at this airport. nonstop flight from CHS to MIA. Today, we are the 10th largest all jet intrastate airline in Florida. By the end of this year, we could be the largest intrastate carrier. Piedmont Aviation's subsidiary. Aviation Supply Corp., has had offices in Florida for more than 50 years. Presently there are AVSCO branches in Opa Locka near Miami, in Orlando and in Tkmpa, with another branch in Ft. Lauderdale scheduled to open in late August. The wholesale parts distributor is the nation’s only parts supply house of Fokker aircraft. THEVEAROF CHALLENGES.

Page Text

This is the computer-generated OCR text representation of this newspaper page. It may be empty, if no text could be automatically recognized. This data is also available in Plain Text and XML formats.

Return to page view