Warbird Information Exchange

recent news about the former Fairchild plant

Have you heard anything lately? There was interest in doing just what you described, but the planned 2017 auction was unfortunately called off at the last minute.

https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/local/former-fairchild-factory-becomes-new-heights-industrial-park/article_81b4a155-ed25-5231-867f-45c536d7c247.html

With several Fairchild Aircraft airplanes behind him, Michael Langer said the company’s old factory could see a bright future.

“This property deserves to be the kind of wonderful economic driver it was in the past,” he said during a ceremony Tuesday afternoon at the former Fairchild grounds adjacent to Hagerstown Regional Airport.

The former hangar and factory areas have been rechristened New Heights Industrial Park.

Langer, of The Langer Co., is part of a new ownership group looking to bring new uses to the complex.

Some of those ideas range from an indoor/outdoor recreational center to aircraft-related uses to distribution facilities to museum and convention center space.

About 60 people attended the open house and ribbon-cutting ceremony in what was once a Fairchild hangar. The Hagerstown Aviation Museum brought several of its Fairchild planes to the hangar. Those machines served as the backdrop for the event.

Langer asked people to “use your vision and imagination” to see “what this property can be.”

Fairchild once employed thousands, and the company ranked as the largest employer in Washington County. Among other things, Fairchild produced many types of aircraft for the military. Fairchild’s A-10 Thunderbolt II, known as the “Warthog,” remains in active duty.

But the company shut down its local operations in the 1980s, according to previous Herald-Mail Media reports.

Most of the complex, now marked by a Topflight Airpark sign at 18450 Showalter Road, has been empty for several years.

The complex has been divided into two parcels. One part includes a two-story, 119,166-square-foot office building. Space is for lease in that structure.

The larger parcel includes 41 acres and the former production and hangar facilities of the Fairchild operation. According to online property records, First Flight Unit 2 Limited Partnership of Chantilly, Va., sold that part of the property in June through a deed in lieu of foreclosure to Topflight Owner LLC for $12,284,636. The mailing address of Topflight Owner LLC is listed in care of The Bluestone Group of New York.

According to its website, Bluestone, a private investment firm, “specializes in taking advantage of value-add scenarios such as under-managed properties, developing markets and distressed assets.”

Eli Tabak and Marc Mendelsohn of The Bluestone Group attended Tuesday’s event. Tabak said The Bluestone Group and The Langer Co. are partners in New Heights.

In addressing the crowd, Langer and Tabak praised the work of local business and economic development leaders, including representatives of the Washington County Department of Business Development.

“It’s amazing to come to a place where everybody’s on the same page. ... We promise to execute on our plan and not stop,” Tabak said.

Some of the other speakers Tuesday were John Seburn, president of the Hagerstown Aviation Museum, and Pam Ebersole, a former Fairchild employee.

Seburn traced a brief history of the company and singled out each airplane on display, from small trainers to large “flying boxcars.”

The museum lacks a permanent space to display the airplanes and memorabilia it owns, he said. And museum space is one of the ideas being considered for the New Heights development.

At one side of the event Tuesday, a video display showed images of what museum and convention center space might look like at New Heights.

Ebersole said she was a project manager in the production control department. She said her father, James Kercheval Jr., was director of engineering at Fairchild.

“It was a really fun job. It was a fast-moving job,” she said.

Ebersole has been a volunteer for the museum. Through that work, she said, she’s learned that Fairchild airplanes have fans far and wide. She’s hoping the New Heights facility will have space for the historic Fairchild planes that were made there.

“People all over the world love Fairchild planes,” she said.

That would be nice...

Chris, Any update on the Vought-Sikorsky / Avco-Lycoming plant ?

Thanks,
Phil

https://www.ctinsider.com/local/ctpost/article/Stratford-details-first-big-piece-of-Army-14847839.php?cmpid=gsa-ctpost-result&_ga=2.105184965.733335475.1574700612-1730828768.1569515607

STRATFORD — A cleanup plan for coastal wetlands on the former Army Engine Plant property calls for dredging up enough contaminated dirt from the site to fill the U.S. Capitol rotunda nearly three times over.

The massive cleanup is years away — and roughly $80 million, by one early estimate — from actually getting done.

And the first step won’t involve the sprawling, 76-acre former factory portion of the property fronting Main Street in Lordship that churned out aircraft engines and planes for nearly seven decades before closing in the late 1990s.

But Mayor Laura Hoydick said it’s a critical next step in “the single largest economic redevelopment opportunity in Stratford.”

Officials will discuss the cleanup proposal in more detail — and residents can make comments — at a public meeting scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Dec. 10 in the Baldwin Center, 1000 West Broad St., which will be conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The property is still owned by the federal government, but the Army has selected Point Stratford Renewal LLC to redevelop it eventually into a mixed-use neighborhood of condominiums, shops, a marina and other attractions.

Those plans are still well down the road, but the cleanup of the roughly 48 acres of tidal flats along the Housatonic River — and a drainage ditch to the southeast of the property — represents the tumbling of one major stumbling block, Hoydick said in a prepared statement announcing next month’s hearing.

“This is the first thing that needs to happen at the site before planned redevelopment activity can take place,” she said. “One of the significant obstacles to this project moving forward has been getting agreement between federal and state authorities on a plan for the environmental remediation of contamination left behind from the plant in the mud flats along the Housatonic River. We have that now.”

Chris Pia, a Town Council member whose District 1 covers the property, said the property’s redevelopment represents “a beautiful, wonderful opportunity for the town.”

“The biggest question that I’ve continued to receive since first running (for office) two and a half years ago is ‘What’s going on with the Army Engine Plant?’” Pia said.

“I know the mayor is working every single week on it with the Army Corps of Engineers, DEEP and the developers,” he said. “When you’ve got so many different large parties involved, things take time. I want this thing back on the tax rolls as soon as possible because it’s only going to benefit the town and the residents of Stratford.”

Contamination aside, the former Avco-Lycoming plant — which went by several other names over the decades — sits on prime real estate.

Near the mouth of the Housatonic River, it offers expansive views of the river and the Sound beyond, the marsh known as the Charles E. Wheeler Wildlife Area and the Connecticut Audubon preserve on the Milford Side of the waterway.

But its former industrial use has left a toxic legacy, according to a summary of the cleanup proposal prepared by the Army Corps.

The wetlands are contaminated by a host of PCBs, metals like arsenic, mercury and cadmium, and a number of other polysyllabic substances like “benzo(k)fluoranthene.”

Testing has been done on the wetlands to see which parts are worst.

“Some of the areas are more contaminated than others,” Remedial Project Manager Erika L. Mark of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday.

Some of the roughly 140,000 cubic yards of contaminated dirt will be taken offsite to special landfills, in accordance with the federal Toxic Substances Control Act.

The least contaminated dirt will be “stabilized” with cement and eventually used as fill on the former factory portion of the property.

The corps ballparked the cost of the cleanup near $80 million, with a timeline of three to four years, but Mark said those numbers could change as further details of the cleanup, currently being designed, get spelled out.

“We won’t have any more specific data until after the design is complete,” Mark said.

Comments or questions to can be sent to Mark via email at Erika.L.Mark@usace.army.mil.

When the cleanup of the wetlands eventually gets done, the former factory part of the site will also need significant environmental remediation, the cost and timeline for which remain an open question.

A message was left with the developer Tuesday.

Hoydick said that after years of inactivity, she is looking forward to the property moving “from a fallow site where aircraft engines were once made to become a part of the economic engine of Stratford.

“We have all been frustrated by how much time has passed since the closure of the plant, to the point where things are really starting to happen,” she said. “This is really the first big piece in seeing that redevelopment goal realized.”

In a statement Wednesday, Kristina Rozek, Director of Communications for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said DEEP “strongly supports the efforts of the U.S. Government to move forward with the remediation of the tidal flat located along the Housatonic River and adjacent to the Stratford Army Engine Plant site.”

“DEEP commends all stakeholders in working cooperatively to prepare for the environmental cleanup work to move forward, and looks forward to working with all stakeholders on future plans for site reuse,” Rozek said.