Ever since IKHANA Aircraft Services was established in 2007, the company has carved itself a pretty successful niche by providing its customers with capabilities far beyond those of your run-of-the-mill MRO facilities. In fact, IKHANA’s very creation was the result of bringing together of two rather unlikely companies.
“IKHANA Aircraft Services was formed when R.W. Martin, Inc., was combined with Total Aircraft Services, Inc., and brought under single ownership,” explained IKHANA CEO, John Zublin. “R.W. Martin was an aircraft heavy maintenance, major repair and modification facility that specialized in vintage warbird aircraft. At one time we did about 80-percent of the Hollywood movies and television shows that required vintage aircraft and aerial camera support.”
Zublin said that at one time Martin’s fleet consisted of the who’s who of warbirds including P-38s, P-51’s, F4Fs, F6Fs, F8Fs, and more. “We refurbished them all and even had to build a few of them up from the data plate,” he said.
“Total Aircraft Services was an engineering services business that specialized in supporting the development of new aircraft, completions and special missions modifications across a wide variety of airframes,” Zublin said. “They did everything from Gulfstreams to 747s and a few others I can’t talk about.”
Zublin said that even before the two companies were combined they would frequently use each other’s areas of expertise on their individual projects.
“When you build a company like IKHANA you have a couple of choices to make,” he said. “You can either choose just to be another repairer, modifier or maintainer or you can actually work to develop products that will allow you to provide a high level sustainability as a growing business.” IKHANA chose option number two.
Today, IKHANA (a Native American Indian word for “intelligent”) Aircraft Services provides a diverse array of customers with a variety and level of Design-Build-Fly capabilities that one would usually think would be available only from the major aircraft OEMs.
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