By James T. Hammond
jhammond@scbiznews.com

The former Donaldson Air Force Base soon will host regular military flight operations for first time in a half-century. A new helicopter base for the South Carolina Army National Guard will meld with a vibrant, diverse industrial and aviation center that was purchased by Greenville city and county governments in 1963 for $421,650.

That deal concluded by visionary local leaders with the federal government to take over the 2,300-acre closed air base has turned out for the region a little like the Louisiana Purchase benefited the United States.

A new economic impact study involving 11 of the 30 companies at SC TAC showed $634.4 million annually in direct economic output that supports 1,377 jobs and an annual payroll of $81.2 million. During the past year, those companies invested $388 million in capital improvements.

When the ripple effect is counted, SC TAC and the companies that have located there generated an additional $381 million in economic activity and 2,358 more jobs, the survey showed.

The $1 billion direct and indirect annual impact on Greenville County makes the aviation-centered industrial park one of the Upstate’s most important jobs machines. With two fixed-base operators, the airport represents a uniquely diverse asset to the Upstate, the flying public and the military.

SCTAC already hosts the second-largest federal contractor in the state, with Lockheed Martin drawing in $956 million last year to refit and upgrade combat, cargo and surveillance aircraft for the military, according to the government Website USASpending.gov.

Within the next three months, the South Carolina Army National Guard will seek contracts to build a $44 million, 102,000-square-foot hangar for a new Army Aviation Support Facility beside the 8,000-foot runway at the former Donaldson Air Force Base. Add to that another $99 million to equip the base, and $3 million in annual spending for operations, and the new military facility will further strengthen SCTAC’s role in the U.S. military’s maintenance, refit and operations in the Upstate.

Overall, defense and other federal contracts brought $1.36 billion in spending into the Fourth Congressional District (Greenville, Spartanburg and Union counties) in fiscal year 2009. And tenants at SCTAC, including Lockheed Martin and Stevens Aviation, comprised a major portion of those expenditures.

The Army National Guard will base 14 of its helicopters, about 70 fulltime personnel, and an additional 145 parttime National Guard soldiers at the new 30-acre aviation center.

Col. Pete Brooks, spokesman for the S.C. Army National Guard, said the aviation center will give the National Guard an alternative location for its aircraft in the event of hurricanes. The current base of operations is just outside Columbia, and “we sometimes get 100 mile-per-hour winds in Columbia,” Brooks said.

In 2000, about 120 helicopters from various locations were evacuated to SCTAC to get them out of the path of an approaching tropical storm.

SCTAC already has a U.S. Army Reserve Center and a U.S. Naval and Marine Reserve Center that will be neighbors to the new Aviation Center.

But the Army Aviation Center is just the latest installment for an economic engine of growth that has risen from the closed Air Force base that Greenville city and county purchased in 1963.

“Just the property alone today is worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Peter Cevallos, the airport operations director. SCTAC has sold and will continue to sell industrial sites to private companies such as 3M and Michelin. But the 1,400-acre core of the airport is maintained intact under the ownership of SCTAC.

Cevallos said SCTAC maintains the 8,000-foot runway and control tower as a federally certified public airport that is host to two fixed-base operators for small aircraft, access to the Lockheed Martin facility for large military aircraft, and an auxiliary landing field for military aircraft. It has been used in the past to evacuate military aircraft from bases near the coast when tropical storms threaten those areas.

SCTAC has about 45,000 flight operations (landings or takeoffs) a year, compared with about 65,000 per year at the Greenville Spartanburg airport. About 1,700 jobs at SCTAC are directly related to airport operations, according to the economic impact report by Jackson Marketing Group.

A second, 5,000-foot runway built by the Air Force, has not been used for flight operations for many years. Jody Bryson, president and CEO of SCTAC, said the center’s governing board has cleared the way to study a proposal to turn that unused runway into several hundred acres of additional industrial sites. The single 8,000-foot active runway is more than adequate to meet the center’s landing and takeover requirements.

SCTAC officials want to get out the message that “there’s a lot going on here, despite the perception among some people that it’s just an old military base,” Cevallos said.

At least one company on the industrial park, Cytec Industries Inc., is part of the supply chain for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Cytec makes the carbon fiber at SCTAC that is used to build the first large airliner body of advanced composite materials instead of metal.

SCTAC faces many challenges in preserving its core function as “a public airport with an industrial flavor,” Cevallos said, not least of which is the trickle of federal funds to maintain and upgrade its runway, taxiways and other vital airport facilities.

“Our challenge is to illustrate how viable and diverse an economy we have here,” Cevallos said.