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Park Aerospace Corp. (Newton, Kan., U.S.) has announced that the company’s largest customer has qualified and fully approved the major expansion of Park’s Newton, Kansas, facilities for production on all of the customer’s aircraft programs. In addition, Park’s first manufacturing production run in the company’s expansion facilities occurred on April 19, 2023.

The expansion, which was designed as a redundant facility to support critical aircraft programs on which the company is sole source qualified, was originally announced in December 2018. Costing approximately $20 million, the expansion consists of about 90,000 square feet of additional manufacturing, laboratory and office space, nearly doubling the size of the facilities’ preexisting footprint.

“We broke ground on our major expansion on August 15, 2019. It was a typical windy and hot summer day in Kansas. I remember having to hold down the tent as I was giving a little speech at the groundbreaking event,” Brian Shore, Park’s chairman and CEO, reminisces. “Of course, when we broke ground, we had no idea that the global pandemic was looming around the corner. The pandemic posed its share of challenges in the construction of the facility and the installation of the complex equipment contained in the facility. But, while many others were slashing their capital spending or canceling their capital projects altogether, we pushed forward with all we had and completed our major expansion project and never looked back.”

“And there is more to this story which should be told,” Shore continues. “Our great production people have been working 60 hour or more weeks on a regular basis for quite a while, and, as a result, did not have the additional bandwidth required to staff the extensive manufacturing trials and qualification runs necessary to qualify the facility’s complex new equipment lines for the aerospace programs they are intended to support. So, in order to avoid delays in the qualification of our new facility and equipment, our R&D and engineering people stepped up and staffed the manufacturing trials and qualification runs. They are staffing early production as well. And I do not recall anybody asking our R&D and engineering people to do these things. They just did them. Thank you for your dedication and loyalty. We are very fortunate at Park to have the people we have.”