Aviation Construction Firm Finds Footing With High-End, Green Projects

Silver Maple Aviation is getting noticed for its large projects, such as a 210-foot-by-170-foot wooden hangar built in New Hampshire.

Silver Maple Aviation built a 210-foot-long-by-170-foot-wide hangar for a private flight department in Concord, New Hampshire. [Courtesy: Silver Maple Aviation]

Silver Maple Aviation is a new entrant to the aviation infrastructure sector but has already left an indelible mark on the industry. 

“Silver Maple Construction’s roots are in very high-end, tricky residential and subcommercial projects, and is new to the aviation space,” said Sean Flynn, company president. “We started like any other construction company with a couple of craft people in a pickup truck building high-end residences and were regularly getting asked to do more and more complex jobs.”

The design-build contractor’s newest focus area was the result of a project that was successful, in part, due to the benefits of general aviation. 

The company has experience building mass timber buildings and hangars, which shows a promising future in the aviation industry. [Courtesy: Silver Maple Aviation]

“Building off-site became a big deal as we started to move into larger projects at a distance,” Flynn said. “That led me to becoming a pilot, which allowed me to manage this project five hours away from a distance more easily.”

The off-the-grid, custom-built home he is referring to was 35,000 square feet and had a helipad on the roof. The team realized that its skills would be in high demand in the aviation industry.

“Because we built the home on top of a mountain with no road, the project site was only open for six months at a time,” he said. “We turned it around very quickly, and this project specifically led us down the road towards aviation because we learned a lot about mass building, as well as green and sustainable building.”

Flynn advised that Silver Maple Aviation is known for its ingenuity and fortitude. A project that embodies the company’s tenacity is a 210-foot-long-by-170-foot-wide hangar that was built for a private flight department in New Hampshire. 

“The Concord hangar project is what I believe to be the largest wooden structure, period, on the east coast,” he said. “We were asked not necessarily to build a green hangar but to build a massive hangar very quickly. This was right at the tail end of COVID and initially went down the steel hangar route. Then we went down the mass timber hangar route, which at the time was about how quick we could get the materials,although I had already been studying up on mass timber in general.”

Between securing permits, designing the structure in-house, fabricating, and erecting the hangar, the project took 13 months to complete. 

In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, mass timber has the benefit of being carbon neutral—something that Flynn said the industry is becoming increasingly attuned to.

“The story around mass timber in aviation is a really good one and the carbon footprint in the industry is something that people are starting to care about,” he said. “You see that with Beta Technologies, Joby Aviation, and a lot of the other electric aircraft. And the fact that we can offset some of that footprint with our work is pretty exciting.

“The impact of mass timber is a result of the balance between the combined tonnage of steel and yards of concrete versus the total number of board feet of sustainably harvested wood we replace it with. If we can sequester more carbon in our wood elements than we create with steel and concrete, we can often even have a carbon-negative building—helping to offset the footprint of the aviation [assets] operated from there.”

Another one of Silver Maple Aviation’s recently completed projects was also notable due to its complexity, although for slightly different reasons than the Concord project.

“We actually constructed an entire airport on a remote island in British Columbia,” Flynn said. “It has a 3,000-by-60-foot paved runway and a mass timber hangar, all of which was finished in seven months.” 

A look at the runway work performed at the Cortes Island Airport (CCI9) in British Columbia, Canada. [Courtesy: Silver Maple Aviation]

The airport is in the northern part of the province, many miles away from the Silver Maple Aviation headquarters. The challenges of building from a distance were eased by Flynn routinely flying his Cirrus SR22T to Canada to check on project status. 

“The biggest challenges were that the airport is on an island, in the furthest corner from us that it could have been to be in the same continent,” he said. “This required a lot of work, from negotiating with the First Nations people, building everything here in Vermont, and barging it to the project site.”

These two projects demonstrated Silver Maple Aviation’s attention to detail and willingness to take on challenging projects. 

The work is starting to get recognized, Flynn said. 

“The Concord project kind of put us on the map in the aviation world and the phones started ringing,” he said. “From there, we are building quite a few steel hangars around the east coast. We are doing much of the general aviation infrastructure at Pease Airport (PSM) in New Hampshire over the next five years, which includes multiple hangar and infrastructure projects. Then we are building a new hangar adjacent to the Beta Technologies facility in South Burlington, Vermont, and a lot of their charging infrastructure across the country.”

Other in-work projects include a full airport retrofit in northern Vermont, a hangar at Middlebury State Airport (6B0), footprint panels for hangar communities across the country, and designs for a handful of hangar homes at multiple airports.

In conjunction with actively pursuing commercial projects, Flynn expects that Silver Maple can showcase its roots by pursuing residential work. He feels that there are ample opportunities at airparks. 

“We have been working a little bit lately with fly-in communities,” he said. “Silver Maple is at its core an extremely talented and capable group of craftspeople able to produce beautiful landmark homes in tough conditions and in tight timelines. When you couple that with our aviation experience and expertise at executive projects at great distances while maintaining our high-quality standards through off-site construction at our home base, we are a natural fit for the kind of work that high end clients are seeking both a beautiful hangar and a stunning home should expect.”

Grant Boyd is a private pilot with eight years of experience in aviation business, including marketing, writing, customer service, and sales. Boyd holds a Bachelor's and a Master's of Business Administration degree, both from Wichita State University, and a Doctor of Education degree from Oklahoma State University. He was chosen as a NBAA Business Aviation "Top 40 Under 40" award recipient in 2020.

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