Telford Group Flight Flight plan takes wing with Dutchman as President
When Telford Allen II founded an aircraft charter company in Waterville, Maine more than 20 years ago, he started with four employees, two planes and one modest plan: Develop the charter business, sell and maintain a few planes and become the airport's fixed-base operator. Allen earned his private pilot's license before graduating from high school, couldn't have known what the small business would become. Today, The Telford Group is a $50 million company boasting 125 employees in sleepy Bangor Maine, a booming parts sales business and millions of dollars in government contracts. It's a long way from the two-plane, two-pilot operation of 1982 - the company is even building a blimp airship that requires no pilot at all.
Now mostly retired from the business, the 60-year-old Allen has turned over operations to his two sons and former Bangor International Airport director Bob Ziegelaar, a Dutchman. Telford Allen III serves as chairman, Travis Allen as vice president of operations, and Ziegelaar as president. On a recent tour of one of Telford's two facilities at Bangor International Airport, Ziegelaar walked among rows of 30-foot-high shelves of boxed parts, explaining the success of the parts sales operation that increasingly makes up Telford's business. "With parts going all over the world, it doesn't really matter where you are," he said, a plastic-wrapped propeller hanging on a nearby beam. The company has personnel stationed on several continents and ships parts, from engines to cockpit radios to toilet seats, all over the world. Numbering in the thousands, the parts are all inventoried in a computer program that can locate the components down to the row and shelf, Ziegelaar said. Back in Bangor, maintenance work keeps Telford's Odlin Road location humming with the clanking sounds of repair work. At the facility, which Telford leases from the city, mechanics crawled in and out of a 35-seat, DeHavilland Dash-8 regional turbine airplane, checking components and making repairs. Aircraft arrive at Telford from all over the world for regular maintenance, and are dismantled from ceiling to floor and reassembled within about a month's time, Ziegelaar said. For every day they're not flying, the planes are losing money for their owners, he said. "The whole airplane gets torn apart," Ziegelaar said. "It's an incredibly intense project." With the maintenance business brisk, Telford has hired approximately 20 mechanics in the last six months, and the company expects to hire 20 more to meet demand, Ziegelaar said.
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