“Who maintains the Lektrow?”
“The line guys, mostly. Unless it’s an electrical issue, then the MRO shop takes a look.”
“And when was the last time the shop billed the line for that work?”
“We don’t bill internally. It’s all one company.”
The consultant, a man named Henderson whose charcoal-gray quarter-zip vest is the exact shade of a corporate cloud, doesn’t nod. He just looks at the seat of the Clark CT50 tow tractor. The vinyl is split, a jagged canyon of plastic revealing yellowed foam that has been roughly mended with four strips of silver duct tape. It looks like a surgical scar that never quite healed.
He writes something down on a digital tablet, his stylus moving with a deliberate, rhythmic precision that suggests he is calculating something much larger than the price of a seat cover.
01
The Archaeology of Neglect
Twenty-two feet away, a ground power unit-a Hobart that has seen better decades-is coughing. It sounds like a chest cold caught in a metal drum. The line supervisor, a man who has spent breathing Jet-A fumes, gives it a practiced kick near the air intake.
On the third try, the engine catches, smoothing out into a roar that vibrates through the soles of my boots. The supervisor smiles, a “see, I told you” expression aimed at Henderson. Henderson does not smile back. He is looking at the oil stain blooming on the asphalt beneath the Hobart’s chassis.
I’m here as a digital archaeologist, a title I gave myself because “consultant who looks at dead files” didn’t have the same ring to it. My job, usually, is to find the data buried in the strata of a thirty-year-old business-the fuel sales from , the lease agreements signed on sticktail napkins, the employee handbooks that haven’t been updated since the invention of the internet.
But today, the archaeology is physical. I’m watching the “stratigraphy” of neglect play out in real-time. I lost an argument yesterday. I was talking to the owner about the -era neon sign over the main hangar lobby. I argued it was a landmark, a piece of aviation soul that added intangible value to the brand.
The buyer’s insurance representative told me it was a “non-conforming fire hazard” and a $14,400 removal liability. I was right about the beauty; he was right about the check. That’s the problem with being right in the middle of a sale: the truth is often less valuable than the deduction.
A Multi-Line Beast
The Northeast FBO we are walking through is a multi-line beast. It has a flight school with six Cessnas, an MRO shop that handles everything from annuals to engine overhauls, a hangar rental business with 42 tenants, and a fuel farm that pumps 1.2 million gallons a year.
The siloed departmental performance vs. the orphaned maintenance of shared equipment.
On paper, these are four distinct revenue streams. In reality, they are a family of four siblings who share a single, aging car. This is the tragedy of the common-pool asset in general aviation. In a siloed business, every department head is judged by their specific P&L.
The flight school manager is incentivized to keep his instructor costs down and his plane utilization up. The MRO manager is focused on billable hours and parts margins. The line manager is obsessed with fuel uplift and turnaround times.
When the flight school needs a tug to pull a 172 out of the grass, they grab the one nearest the door. When the MRO shop needs to move a King Air into the hangar, they grab the same tug. But when that tug needs a $4,000 transmission overhaul, the finger-pointing begins.
The Organizational Lens of Rust
The flight school manager says it’s an MRO asset. The MRO manager says it’s a line asset. The owner, looking at the aggregate bottom line, sees that the tug “still works” and decides to wait until next quarter. That “wait until next quarter” becomes a decade-long policy.
As Henderson moves toward the de-icing truck-a FMC that looks like it belongs in a museum of the Cold War-I realize he isn’t just looking at the equipment. He is looking at the organizational chart through the lens of the rust.
If the de-icer hasn’t been serviced since the Obama administration, what does that say about the training records in the flight school? If the GPU leaks oil like a wounded whale, what does that say about the safety culture in the MRO?
Owner’s View
“Loyal soldier that has never failed to start a customer’s jet.”
Buyer’s View
“$38,000 replacement cost subtracted from EBITDA.”
In the world of aviation M&A, the “shared asset” is a ghost that haunts the closing table. Multi-line businesses are often valued by summing their parts-fuel, hangar, shop, school-but the infrastructure that binds them together is where the value leaks out.
It is easy to audit a fuel ledger. It is much harder to audit the ten years of deferred maintenance on a hangar roof that covers three different departments. The owner tells me, “It runs fine,” as we walk past a nitrogen cart with a cracked gauge.
Identifying Orphaned Assets
When a firm like Griffin Towers represents a seller, they aren’t just looking at the fuel volumes or the hangar occupancy rates. They are looking for these “orphaned” assets.
They know that a buyer’s consultant will spend six hours photographing every piece of equipment that doesn’t have a dedicated line item in the budget. They know that the duct tape on the tow tractor is actually a signal-a flashing neon sign that says “we don’t have a system for what we share.”
The tug serves every line of revenue but belongs to none of their budgets, leaving the seller to pay for a decade of silence in a single afternoon.
We move into the MRO shop. The floor is painted a light gray, but the paint is worn down to the bare concrete in a path leading from the tool room to the break area. Henderson stops. He isn’t looking at the tools. He’s looking at a stack of yellowed manuals on a shelf near the window.
They are for a model of avionics that hasn’t been installed in a plane since .
“Do you still service these?” Henderson asks.
“Occasionally,” the MRO manager says. “We keep the manuals just in case.”
Henderson notes the dust on the manuals. In his mind, those manuals represent “dead space,” which translates to “inefficient square footage,” which translates to a lower rent-equivalent value for the MRO line. It’s an archaeological layer of the business that has ceased to be productive, yet the owner still pays to heat and light the air around it.
The Managerial Fog
This is the hidden tax of the multi-line FBO. The complexity of managing four different businesses under one roof often leads to a “managerial fog.” You spend so much time dealing with the crisis of the day-a broken flight school plane, a late fuel delivery, a tenant who hit a hangar door-that you lose sight of the connective tissue.
You stop seeing the duct tape. You stop hearing the cough of the GPU. You assume that because the business is making money, the assets are being preserved. But assets don’t preserve themselves. They decay according to the laws of entropy, accelerated by the lack of ownership.
After the Surplus Property Act, many municipal airports were flooded with equipment that was never intended for civilian longevity. There is a historical precedent for this “inherited neglect.” We’ve spent in general aviation trying to make do with what we have, patching the old with the new, until the line between “operational” and “obsolete” becomes a smudge.
!
The Lease Assignment
As we wrap up the ramp tour, Henderson stands by the fence, looking out at the runway. The wind is picking up, a biting cold that hints at the coming winter.
“The airport sponsor,” Henderson says, not looking at me. “How do they feel about the lease assignment?”
This is the real deal-killer. All the talk about tugs and GPUs is just a prelude to the negotiation over the lease. If the airport sponsor-the city or the county-doesn’t like the look of the ramp, if they see the duct tape and the oil stains and the de-icer, they start to wonder if the buyer is the right fit for the community.
The “shared assets” are the face of the business to the landlord. I think back to the argument I lost about the neon sign. I realize now that the insurance guy wasn’t just worried about a fire. He was worried about the message the sign sent. It said: “We are living in the past.”
The owner joins us at the fence. He looks tired. Diligence day is a marathon of being told your baby is ugly.
“Everything okay?” the owner asks.
Henderson finally smiles, but it’s the smile of a man who has finished a jigsaw puzzle and found three pieces missing.
“We have a lot to talk about,” he says.
We walk back toward the lobby, past the tow tractor. I notice a fifth strip of duct tape on the seat. It’s a slightly different shade of silver-fresher, shinier. Someone on the line must have noticed the consultant looking at it and tried to “fix” it while we were in the shop.
It’s a touching gesture, in a way. A small act of pride from a line crew that knows the equipment is failing but wants to put on a good show. But as we step back into the heated lobby, smelling the faint scent of stale popcorn and aviation oil, I know it won’t matter. The archaeology is done. The layers have been peeled back.
In the end, nobody owned the tug, so the seller ended up paying for it twice: once in the missed utility of a better machine, and once more in the final offer.
The archaeology of a sale is rarely about what you find. It’s about what’s missing-the maintenance logs, the dedicated budget lines, and the realization that “one company” doesn’t mean “one responsibility.” As Henderson closes his tablet, I can almost hear the sound of the check being rewritten. It sounds exactly like the cough of an old GPU in the cold wind.