Transparency-first GA maintenance

The two military veteran co-owners started the company as their fourth business venture—hence the name Fourth Front—in an effort to fix a lot of what they saw was missing from the GA maintenance space.

“For a lot of owners, the maintenance shop is a black box,” Wellman said. “You drop off your aircraft and that’s it. You don’t know when you’re going to get it back, you don’t know the cost or what you’re waiting on. I thought that process could be improved.”

The duo set out to solve that problem, opening their doors to GA aircraft up to turboprops with a focus on putting transparency back into the maintenance process.

“Rather than calling us up, rather than stopping by the shop, [owners] can log in at any point in time and see, here’s where my aircraft's at, here’s what it’s waiting on, here’s when I can expect to get it back,” Wellman said. Santa Monica, apart from a Cirrus maintenance facility, had been without a GA maintenance shop on the field for some time, and the co-owners recognized the opportunity.

“It’s an underserved airport in terms of maintenance capabilities,” Schaefer said. “Having a local solution, so they don’t have to fly to Van Nuys, or whichever other airfield to get their maintenance done, it’s such a convenience and benefit to the aircraft to have locally here.”

But Schaefer and Wellman both recognize the skill shortage in GA maintenance, something they hope to solve with A&P apprenticeships, which have become less common in recent years. An equally big issue, Schaefer said, is that a lot of A&P mechanics feel forced out of the GA maintenance space, either by higher pay or better benefits at the airline level.

“We have the old hands that have been doing this for 40, 50 years and know everything about everything,” Wellman said. “We’re trying to build up and empower that next generation through the apprentice program and pull all the knowledge that we can out of the old hands … so GA is prepared for the future.”

“You’re always learning, and I’m grateful for that,” said Eric Mirzaian, part of the apprentice program at Fourth Front. “I’m not one of the people to be in a kind of repetitive work environment, keeping me on my toes, always looking forward for the next day, which I'm grateful for, so I guess … that makes it an actual career, because you enjoy what you’re doing, in comparison to just a job.”

In the future, Fourth Front Aviation hopes to expand into more airports to continue to spread its transparency-first philosophy and apprenticeship program around the West Coast. Schaefer and Wellman also hope it reaches a stage where owners can seamlessly transition between Fourth Front Aviation facilities, with digital records following each aircraft to any Fourth Front location.