Pilot makes a happy landing recycling planes

In a hangar that housed Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, a former County Durham pilot has set up a business, Sycamore Aviation, to recycle decommissioned planes.

At the back of the 45,000 sq ft building, a Boeing 737 from Russia lies in bits. It looks like a super-sized Airfix kit.

Kevin O’Hare’s team of engineers are harvesting parts that will be sent around the world. There is serious money to be made, the former Jet2 captain tells me.

The demand for specialist spares means that a second-hand aircraft can often be worth more in pieces than it is complete. The ballast fluorescent light units for example, which illuminated the 737’s cockpit interior, are worth about £1,000 each.

Project manager John Wright tells me that the main fuselage will soon be making its final trip – up the A1 to Newcastle International Airport’s training academy, where it will be used as a mock-up for new cabin crews.

Airplane parts are removed to be used again

Sycamore engineers are stripping out metals destined for EMR’s recycling facility in Hartlepool. Hardly anything is wasted. The in-flight toilets, which gave thousands of passengers mile-high relief, are stacked neatly on the floor.

On nearby shelves sit about 40 packs of components in bubble wrap. “That lot is worth $1.2m,” Mr O’Hare tells me.

“It could be more. The price can rocket when someone needs a particular part at very short notice.”

One sideline he’s considering is to covert bits of aircraft into furniture.

On his laptop he shows me wings made into conference tables and bits of fuselage that have become office dividers. It’s a niche market that could become a profitable sideline.

Sycamore has repaired the hangar’s leaky roof, replaced windows and – much to the dismay of RAF history buffs – painted over the floor markings that designated parking spots for the Lancasters. The airport staff who had marked out a section of the floor as a five-a-side pitch aren’t too pleased with the clean-up either, but it was essential if the business hoped to impress potential clients.

Kevin O’Hare in front of a fuselage being recycled. 

DERELICT rooms along one side of the hangar are being turned into modern offices. In one of them stands a pile of about 30 cardboard boxes filled with A4 papers.

They contain the entire service history of the dismantled 737. Every nut and bolt has a document that can be traced back to the original maker.

Without the correct paperwork, many parts are worthless. Aviation is a safety- conscious industry that prizes provenance.

After trying to get the business started two years ago, Mr O’Hare is a man in a hurry.

The idea occurred to him when he took a career break from his job as a pilot to care for his two-year-old daughter who had developed cancer. After a traumatic period where the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle became “like a second home” for him and his wife, his daughter recovered and Mr O’Hare decided to quit the cockpit and become his own boss.

He scoured airfields all over the UK.

Launching a recycling business close to his home near Chester-le-Street had obvious appeal.

The business began at DTV nearly two years ago, but efforts to strike a long-term deal with then owners Vancouver Airport Services were stymied, costing Mr O’Hare hundreds of thousands of pounds.

He recalls: “For a year, we jumped through all sorts of hoops, rewriting the business plan time and again. It was so frustrating. I remortgaged my house, because I knew this was a viable business. In the end I don’t think they (Vancouver) ever really wanted us here. It was a year of hell basically.

“There is a different air about the way things are being done with (new owners) Peel. They are making all of the right sounds about committing for the long haul,” says Mr O’Hare, who is full of praise for Andy Foulds, the airport’s commercial director, who recently approved a five year lease on Sycamore’s base that is also home to the Cleveland Police helicopter.

THE deal will earn the airport rent and landing fees, but there is a much bigger prize at stake.

The airport loses about £2m a year.

An aeroplane squeezes into a hangar

Passenger numbers have plummeted from nearly a million a year in 2006 to less than 200,000 in 2012. Low-cost carriers such as Jet2 have ignored DTV and invested heavily in Leeds/Bradford and Newcastle. The short-term prospect of attracting new flights are slim, so the success of aviation-related companies like Sycamore are key to DTV balancing the books.

Mr O’Hare is close to agreeing a deal for specialist tooling, which would enable his team to not only remove engines – the most valuable part of the aircraft – but to strip and process them on site. Being able to offer a one-stopshop could help the fledgling firm land much more lucrative orders.

Sycamore expects to handle at least a plane a month and turnover about £1.5m in year one. Its ambitions go further.

Talks have begun that could see land south of the terminal building used for a second breakers yard.

Mr O’Hare can already envisage the site becoming home to a manufacturing production line in reverse, which takes regular deliveries of aircraft and turns them into parts and raw materials.

Adding a logistics operation to distribute the parts, and a recycling plant for metals and plastics could create a fully integrated end-to-end process.

All of this will need funding. Peel will find out this summer if a bid to the Government’s regional growth fund has been successful. It will need to convince ministers that it can create jobs.

Sycamore employs six engineers and recruits contractors to help with big projects but Mr O’Hare reckons he could employ up to 40 before too long if things go according to plan.

“I’d like to think in five years we’ll have a purpose-made facility on the south side, approved by the industry’s biggest names – Boeing and Airbus – that is the biggest and best in Europe.

I can see that happening but we need to grow the concept on the current scale; get some money in the bank, which allows us to raise a decent amount of venture capital money, and take things forward.”

Bids to North-East funding pots have hit a brick wall, but Mr O’Hare speaks highly of Newcastle-based Entrepreneurs’ Forum for encouraging him to follow his business instincts.

He is now at the stage all entrepreneurs dream about when potential clients and backers are starting to call and opportunities abound. There is a real buzz about the place.

Some of Mr O’Hare’s former colleagues from the aviation industry are keen to leave well-paid jobs and join the venture.

After we chat for about ten minutes he checks his phone. It has more than a dozen missed calls. The first one he returns is from his wife – a sign that while his business is about to take off Mr O’Hare is determined to stay grounded.