And this may be just the beginning, as the company readies for construction of slightly bigger third and fourth hangars at Dayton International Airport to accommodate a new $13 billion Air Force contract.
Tuesday’s event at SNC’s Aviation Innovation & Technology Center on Old Springfield Road featured both a ribbon cutting for the new hangar and a ceremonial groundbreaking for the planned third and fourth hangars.
Pending the approval of state and local incentives for those future hangars, construction on those will start this year. Shook Construction will spearhead the project.
“These new facilities will play a crucial role in meeting the demanding needs of our nation’s defense, fully realized by the importance of the mission this aircraft behind us represents,” said Jon Piatt, SNC’s executive vice president for ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), aviation and security.
The aircraft behind Piatt, parked just outside the new hangar, was a Boeing 747, which — after extensive modification by SNC’s workforce — will become part of the nation’s Survivable Airborne Operations Center or “Doomsday” plane program.
This is the kind of craft on which national leaders will be transported and protected and will serve as a mobile airborne command center in the event of a national emergency.
SNC announced in May that it will more than double its Dayton presence by building two hangars thanks to a $13 billion Air Force contract to update the “SAOC” airplane.
That was the kind of expansion leaders at SNC had in mind all along when they broke ground on their first hangar in Dayton in February 2022.
“I bet my career and reputation that we could pull this off,” Mark C. Williams, SNC’s senior vice president of strategy, told the Dayton Daily News in May. “That’s how I view it from my perspective.”
He added: “It was worth the risk.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted thanked SNC for taking that risk, and J.P. Nauseef, president and chief executive of JobsOhio, the state’s private jobs creation arm, reminded listeners of the reasons why Ohio and the Dayton area made the risk worth taking, in his view.
Dayton is close to SNC’s customers, including the Air Force Materiel Command, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The AFMC spends some $7 billion to $10 billion a year on fleet sustainment, and most of that money is spent outside Ohio, Nauseef noted. The presence of SNC in Dayton helps ensure more of that money is spent within the Buckeye State.
And Ohio is home to the workforce talent and supplier talent that SNC needs, with some 600 aerospace original equipment manufacturers, the JobsOhio CEO said.
“I know this is only the beginning,” Husted said.
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