MADRAS — If the newest tenant at the Madras Municipal Airport proves to be the boost many in the area hope it will be, its success may come down to a matter of 2 inches.

That’s the gap between the top of the hangar door at the airport and the very tip of the tail of the MD-87, the plane Erickson Aero Tanker is banking on turning in to the firefighting air tanker of the future.

Madras built the hangar at the city-owned airport between 2008 and 2010 as a home for Butler Aircraft, a Redmond company that needed a space to service its fleet of air tankers. Butler sold its air tanker operations to Aero Air of Hillsboro late last year, which then joined with Erickson Group Ltd. to form Erickson Aero Tanker to chase a Forest Service contract designed to modernize the country’s fleet of air tankers.

The company purchased seven MD-87s from the Spanish carrier Iberia, and has already moved two of them to Madras. Two more are at the company’s headquarters in Hillsboro, two are in Arizona and one is still in Spain. But by the end of the summer, five of the seven are expected to be at their new home in Madras.

Chuck Rhodes, maintenance supervisor for Erickson Aero Tanker, said it was a harrowing few minutes the first time they tried rolling one of the MD-87s through the hangar, but the plane’s tail cleared the door. As construction of an even larger hangar next door begins, the main hangar will serve as maintenance hub for the first planes the company is readying for certification by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Forest Service.

The new hangar will do double duty as the home of Erickson founder Jack Erickson’s collection of 30 or so WWII-era planes currently housed at the Tillamook Air Museum. The first of Erickson’s vintage planes will arrive in Madras later this summer, and over the next three years, the entire collection will move into its new home.

Upgrading the fleet

When the Forest Service needs to drop water or retardant on a forest fire, it calls on one of the companies contracted to keep its planes and crews at the ready through the fire season.

Older, propeller-driven planes like the three DC-7s Aero Air acquired from Butler Aircraft have served as the backbone of the air tanker fleet for decades, but as the planes have aged, the fleet has shrunk. Concerns about the planes’ airworthiness led the Forest Service to ground many of the air tankers previously under contract, cutting the fleet from 43 in 2000 to 11 in 2011.

Last spring, the Forest Service announced plans to upgrade its fleet, committing to 18 to 28 modern planes over the next 10 years. Five companies, including Erickson Aero Tanker, were awarded contracts earlier this year to provide the first seven planes.

Glen Newton, air tanker operations manager for Erickson Aero Tanker, said while he’s a believer in the MD-87, all of the planes being retrofitted to serve as air tankers would be an improvement over most of the planes in the sky today.

“At some point you want to get newer, you want to go faster, you want to carry more,” Newton said.

Fully loaded, the MD-87 air tanker will carry approximately 4,000 gallons of retardant, he said, nearly twice the load of many of the planes it aims to replace. Though it’s a small load compared to the 11,000 gallons carried by the DC-10s that have been converted to air tankers, the MD-87 is a more maneuverable plane, Newton said, and able to land and reload its retardant tanks at many more airports than its larger cousins. Though Erickson Aero Tanker anticipates it could have as many as 10 modified MD-87s based in Madras within five years, Newton expects Redmond, just a 10-minute flight away, to remain the only airport in the region where retardant will be available for air tankers.

Vying for the museum

Even before Erickson Aero Tanker was formed, the Madras Airport was courting Erickson about moving the air museum to Central Oregon.

Airport manager Rob Berg met with representatives of the museum in May 2012, a few months after they’d announced plans to leave Tillamook once their lease expired.

Though Berg couldn’t promise them a similar facility — the WWII-era blimp hangar that currently houses the museum covers seven acres — he was able to offer long stretches of sunny, dry weather, something other coastal locations that vied for the museum couldn’t match.

The museum is a “flying museum,” Berg said, where most of the planes still able to fly are taken out for demonstration flights regularly, sometimes with museum visitors on board.

Though the museum and the air tanker base were not a package deal, Berg said, being able to offer a location where both could relocate was a definite advantage for Madras.

“You have to go find these opportunities, you kind of create them in some ways,” he said. “This was going to go somewhere, and we came up with all the right reasons to have it here.”

Newton said the lack of activity at the Madras Airport made it an attractive location for both the air tanker base and the museum.

“It makes it a lot easier to do what we want to do because there’s not a lot of traffic, not a lot of air traffic,” Newton said. “It’s an uncontrolled airport, so you’re not sitting on the runway waiting for people to take off.”

New jobs for the area?

Erickson Aero Tanker employes 15 to 16 pilots and mechanics today, Newton said, but could grow to 50 or 60 in Madras over the next few years.

Some of the company’s prospects for future growth are out of its hands. Newton said while it’s likely Forest Service will look to continue expanding the fleet of modern air tankers, it’s not certain, and it’s unclear when those orders would come in. The company is also looking at outfitting MD-87s for firefighting in Europe and Australia, but hasn’t signed any contracts.

Jones, with the Forest Service, said it’s an open question as to how quickly the Forest Service will try to fill the contracts for the planes it’s committed to, or if it will look to expand the air tanker fleet even further.

“The reason we have that range is these are air tankers we haven’t used in the field before, and until we figure out these planes and their tanks and how they work, we can’t really nail that down,” she said.

The company is still weighing how much of the work converting the planes for air tanker use can be done in Madras. Newton said it’s difficult to assemble the staff and equipment to do the conversions if the work will only last for a short time, but that there are clear advantages to having all operations at a single location.

Janet Brown with Economic Development for Central Oregon said while the Madras Airport is well-used by businesses based in the industrial area around the airport, aviation-related businesses have been more difficult to attract. Brown said she’s viewing Erickson Aero Tanker as a high-profile anchor tenant that could lure more businesses to the hundreds of acres of developable land around the airport that’s been set aside for the aviation industry.

“Not only do they bring good, solid, industrial well-paying jobs to the county, but it’s a company that provides a service nationwide, in fact, worldwide,” she said.

The air tanker base is likely to draw short-term business to Madras as well. Pilots seeking certification to fly the converted MD-87s will have to make two visits to Madras, Newton said, one to familiarize themselves with the aircraft, and a second to do live flight training.

Court Priday, manager at the Inn at Cross Keys Station, said if attendees at the annual Madras Airshow are any guide, both the museum and the tanker should draw the kind of visitors Madras has sometimes struggled to attract.

“Most of the airplane guys have a little bit of money, it seems,” he said.

Even though it’s only been a few months since the company arrived in town, the local business community has benefited from Erickson Aero Tanker’s presence, Brown said.

“We’re very excited to have Erickson here. They’re very good community people, they try to do as much as they can here with their shopping and their business needs,” she said. “They’re a great company.”