KF Aerospace is adding to its maintenance, repair and overhaul capacity, which means they will be looking to fill more local jobs.
The new hangar will add 21,000 sq. feet to KF’s Hangar 1, one of five customer-dedicated hangars at the base, said Grant Stevens, the VP of Corporate Services, Thursday morning.
It will bring KF’s capacity to a total of 13 concurrent lines of narrow body and regional aircraft maintenance, grow its staffing from 725 to 800 in 2020, and expand the YLW base to a total 370,000 sq. feet.
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Stevens said that to meet the expanded capacity 75 new jobs will have to be filled. This, he noted, is challenging.
“Aviation is a worldwide industry and there is a Canadian world wide shortage when it comes to recruiting,” he said.
“We think in a multi-prong approach in order to acquire the staff necessary to continue to grow the operation. Part one was working with Okanagan College and graduating more local students.”
They’ve also been recruiting all across Canada and in the last couple of years they managed to get 100 people from across the country to move to Kelowna to work for them.
They’ve also been working with the government and have approvals to bring people in from other countries.
“We will bring 40 to 50 people from other countries and we’re aggressively recruiting from other companies,” said Stevens. “It takes a lot of time by HR staff to do that.”
In addition to being Canada’s largest commercial MRO, KF is the largest private sector employer in Kelowna. KF Aerospace President, Tracy Medve says the project is part of a steady growth program across Canada. “In tandem with the major expansion of our Hamilton base, we are excited to be making additional investments in Kelowna that will help us support our airline partners with world-class maintenance services.”
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