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Downey’s Flying High Again After C&D Aerospace

The seat-manufacturing unit of Huntington Beach-based EnCore Group has lined up three launch customers as it awaits clearance for one of the toughest certification approvals in aviation.

LIFT, which was established in 2014 by James Downey and Tom McFarland, will supply tourist class seating for Indian airliner SpiceJet. The low-cost carrier signed a deal with Boeing Co. to purchase as many as 225 aircraft.

The seats are made for the B737 aircraft and tailored for Boeing’s newly designed Sky Interior. The first deliveries are scheduled for next month.

LIFT has also attracted two European airline customers.

Polskie Linie Lotnicze LOT SA, which operates as LOT Polish, flies some five million passengers annually from its Warsaw hub. The company launched a direct flight from Los Angeles to Poland’s capital city in April.

Monarch, a low-cost airliner based in the U.K., has a $3.2 billion deal with Chicago-based Boeing to purchase an aircraft fleet of 30 737 MAX 8s. The first delivery of the narrow body jets is planned for next year.

EnCore’s strategic relationship with aerospace giant Boeing, its largest customer, provided a solid foundation for LIFT to get off the ground.

“The LIFT business is one of the biggest growth opportunities for EnCore,” said Chief Technical Officer Mike McCarthy, who took the post in April.

The company’s other units are also trending in the right direction, those three accounting for the lion’s share of revenue, which topped $122 million in the 12 months through June, up 43% from two years earlier. The increase ranked 13th among the largest firms with sales over $100 million on the Business Journal’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies list in this week’s issue.

Sales at EnCore Composite Structures, which operates out of a 120,000-square-foot factory in Brea, have doubled since Downey acquired Irvine-based Composites Unlimited Inc. in 2011 for an undisclosed amount and bought London-based BAE Systems PLC’s composite structures line of business in Brea for $32.5 million.

EnCore Interiors in Huntington Beach supplies galleys, closets, partitions, dividers and other stand-up compartments on commercial airplanes for established customers, including Southwest, Delta, and American Airlines.

An international unit was set up two years ago in Mexico to handle production and delivery of sidewall panels and cargo-liner compartments for Boeing’s 787-10. The Tijuana location houses EnCore’s machine shop and handles subassemblies for all of the company’s growing business divisions and orders delivered to airframe manufacturers.

“They’re all growing,” said McCarthy, one of dozens of EnCore employees who worked under Downey earlier in their careers.

Do it Again

In many respects Downey is recreating the blueprint that made him a star and a fortune in the aerospace sector.

He built C&D Aerospace in Huntington Beach from the ground up and sold it in 2005 for $600 million to Zodiac SA in France. C&D played a key role in securing retrofit cockpit doors and installing bullet-proof wall paneling on Boeing narrow body, or single aisle, planes after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

C&D is still in Huntington Beach under the Zodiac Banner.

Zodiac agreed in May to a $7.7 billion buyout from French aerospace supplier and jet engine maker Safran SA in the industry’s second blockbuster deal this year. Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Rockwell Collins Inc. became the market leader in aircraft seat production that same month after closing its $8.6 billion acquisition of B/E Aerospace Inc. in Florida.

EnCore appears to be on a similar ascent as C&D before its sale.

McCarthy would know.

He joined C&D in 1990 as a mechanical engineer right out of college. He spent 15 years there, rising up the ranks before its sale to Zodiac, where he spent another 11 years.

McCarthy left the company this year and contemplated retirement or another career, but was drawn back by MacFarlane, a longtime family friend who was hired at C&D by Downey a few years earlier as a young University of Notre Dame engineering graduate.

“When I walked in I knew 80% of the people here,” McCarthy said. “It was more like a reunion.”

EnCore has grown local employment to more than 650.

“It’s very much like C&D back in the 1990s,” McCarthy said. “It has that same flavor.”

He oversees about 90 personnel in engineering, planning, purchasing, supply chain, production and quality assurance. With a three-year forecast and back orders in the pipeline, he projects that number will triple in the next five years.

“The priority now is starting this seat business.”

Downey has poured millions into making that a reality. EnCore’s headquarters is outfitted with a custom-made dynamic crash test center, one of the few in the world. The chamber propels crash dummies on an acceleration sled powered by two compressed air tanks at a G-force of 16, or the known limits of survivability in a plane crash.

EnCore runs one seat test per day on average on the 120-foot runway built with 1 million pounds of concrete and reinforced steel.

The speed is so fast—fractions of a second—that the motion can’t be captured by the human eye. Four crash test dummies, outfitted and embedded with sensors that put their individual cost in the tens of thousands, are analyzed after every jarring trial run on a host of criteria, from head trauma, to leg and arm movement, to impact.

The testing is all geared toward gaining seat certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, a lengthy approval process that could come by the end of the month.

“Everyone is focused on making a great product, because a great product makes a great company,” McCarthy said.

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