Avionics contractor opens $2.5M expansion of Calgary fighter jet repair facility

Avionics contractor Peraton celebrated the opening Tuesday of a $2.5-million expansion to its Calgary facility, along with one huge milestone.

The facility which opened in 1999 completed its 50,000th repair for the Royal Canadian Air Force's fleet.

Peraton repairs and maintainsthe CF-188s popularly known as CF-18 Hornets that are still in service with the RCAF. The government has announced it plans to eventually replace the aging fleet, but in the meantime is working to keep the remaining 76 planes in service.

"It's a lot of airplanes, a lot of support required," said Col. Francois Bradley, the director of the aerospace equipment management program with the RCAF.

Bradley described it as a constant battle to keep jets safe to operate for Canada's missions with NATO and NORAD.

"It's always a balance between maintaining what we have and upgrading or changing or modifying to something newer or more economical."

Jim Gillespie, the vice-president of PeratonCanada, said Calgary has a strong aerospace and defence industry.

The facility, located in the city's northeast near the Calgary International Airport, is just blocks away from another military contractor, Raytheon Canada.

Peraton's 76,000-sq.ft. building has now expanded to add an engineering lab.

Gillespie said the companyworks on both scheduled maintenance and unexpected failures or incidents with the aging jet fleet but at the end of the day, the main thing is supporting the pilots.

"We think about operational readiness and supporting deployments more than we think about the technical engineering problems," he said.

• MORE CALGARY NEWS |Calgary gas-and-dash killer asks Court of Appeal for lower sentence
• MORE CALGARY NEWS |WestJet's compassionate and confused chatbot sends happy customer to suicide prevention site
• Read more articles byCBC Calgary, like us onFacebookfor updates and subscribe to ourCBC Calgary newsletterfor the day's news at a glance

With files from Mike Symington.