A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;in 2007, Curt came to&nbsp;the publication&nbsp;from the broadcast industry where he was a national science and technology television reporter and producer. He writes on the FBO field, aviation finance, and sustainable aviation and occasionally contributes to&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;sister publication&nbsp;Business Jet Traveler. Curt was a member of the AINtv reporting staff that won the 2008 Aerospace Journalist of the Year award for Best Airshow Daily. That same year, he was a finalist for another AJOYA award. He earned an AJOYA for Best Business Aviation Submission in 2018 and was a finalist in that category in 2021. He received the National Air Transportation Association’s&nbsp; Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with&nbsp;Consumer Reports’ television division, CRTV, and for several local television news staffs. An honors graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University in 1995. Curt lives in New York State with his wife and two young sons.

Senior Editor

Curt Epstein

While Texas-based Haven Aviation Services Group has been in operation only since 2017, it already has outgrown its city-leased 10,000-sq-ft facility at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport (KAMA). In March, the company moved into its current 40,000-sq-ft location on the field, part of the Signature Aviation FBO.
Haven Aviation focuses on scheduled maintenance for light and midsize business jets and turboprops. “Our specialty lies in the legacy Citations and CJs and some of the more off-the-path jets like Premiers and Beechjets,” said CEO Travis Lamance. “We do a lot of those and then the whole King Air line and anything [Pratt &amp; Whitney Canada] PT6 powered.”
While the emphasis is on the lower end of the business aircraft spectrum, Haven’s Amarillo facility can accommodate aircraft as large as ultra-long-range business jets. “We can do some heavies and we’ve done some, but we don’t hold ourselves out there to be the guys for that,” Lamance told AIN.
With its staff of 20 technicians, the location usually has around 15 aircraft in the KAMA shop at one time. But with a backlog of scheduled maintenance extending through April, Haven expects to add four more mechanics and move to a second shift by March.
The company holds avionics dealer authorization from Garmin and Collins and is about to secure approval from Honeywell. On the airframe modification side, it holds authorizations from Blackhawk, Raisbeck, and BLR.
As an A&amp;P mechanic himself, Lamance is familiar with the labor perspective and is more sympathetic to them than many other business owners might be. “I’ve structured the company and our values, systems, and processes to be very mechanic-friendly,” he said. “We have very low turnover, and we do that through the company culture and environment that lends itself to them sticking around.”
That background also provides Lamance with a built-in stress reliever. “When office life is getting to me, dealing with all the woes of running a business, one of my favorite things to do is to go down on the floor and take on a project and spend a day or two working,” he explained. “I actually enjoy that part of it, but it’s pretty rare I get to do that now.”
This year the company marked its first expansion with the acquisition of Private Jet Maintenance, a service provider at New York’s Buffalo Niagara International Airport (KBUF). While the location is 1,500 miles from Haven’s Amarillo flagship location, that separation is part of the company’s plan to reach new customers, according to Lamance.
“We have a lot of maintenance customers that come in to see us in Amarillo from all over the Midwest and the Western U.S., so [Buffalo] was a good geographic location for us,” he said. “Around the New York City area is super dense with aircraft, and a fair amount of support network, but it's increasingly hard to get in with those [maintenance providers], and it's increasingly expensive.
“So [in] upstate New York, we’re not far away for them to reposition or for us to do AOG events down there. We can lower the cost profile a little bit and kind of help with availability to pick up a lot of those clients.”
The Buffalo facility—which just completed its relocation into a 24,000-sq-ft hangar, also part of the Signature complex on the field—possesses an FAA Part 145 repair station designation. Despite it being smaller than the Amarillo facility, Haven expects to soon have its Texas headquarters location listed as a satellite facility under that Part 145 certificate.
Both locations have AOG repair teams that serve their respective areas. “From our perspective, as long as they want us to pay for travel time, we’ll go wherever they need us to,” said Lamance.
In addition, the company expects to open its first FBO at KAMA around April. Lamance expects that will open up another 10,000 sq ft of maintenance space at the airport through the relocation of active aircraft to the FBO's hangars.
Beyond that, more growth is on the company’s radar. “We want to be able to be geographically located in areas to support our customers all over the U.S.,” said Lamance, “so we need to get something further out west, and we need to get something down in the southeast.” He added he is working on several possible leads for acquisition.
His staff is dedicated to helping their clients any way they can, as evidenced by one recent situation where an owner-pilot noticed oil leaking from the cowling of his aircraft after landing in Amarillo for a fuel stop on a cross-country flight. Haven’s technicians discovered a leaky prop seal but as the aircraft was not one they typically worked on, they did not have the spare parts on hand.
The distraught pilot explained he was rushing to Nashville where his daughter was about to give birth to his first grandchild. One of the Haven staff volunteered to drive four hours to Oklahoma City—the closest location for the parts—and back. The technicians then gathered in the wee hours to conduct the repairs and checks overnight, leaving the pilot clear to make an early-morning departure.
“I thought that was fun how our team went above and beyond to get him up and running,” said Lamance. “All of [them] wanted to make sure we did everything we could to make sure he didn’t miss the birth.”

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