High-flying Kelowna business expanding

• Kelowna's largest private sector employer
• Provides job opportunities for young people
• Significantly expanding operations
• Adding many more jobs in the next year

An aerospace company, which is already Kelowna’s largest private sector employer, is looking to hire roughly 100 more employees for their operations within the next 12 months.

Grant Stevens, the chief corporate services officer for KF Aerospace, told Kelowna10 about the company's plan for expansion.

“Back in 2020, KF was on a significant expansion mode, and we had pretty much maxed out our facilities and staffing here in Kelowna,” Stevens said.

“The pandemic hit, things slowed down a little bit. We managed to maintain the majority of our staff during the pandemic, and we are now back up to our pre-pandemic operating levels.”

The company is Canada’s largest commercial MRO (maintenance, repair, overhaul), and is focused on a variety of different specialties within the aviation industry.

Their services include anything from cargo conversions, to military flight training.

“We’ve done a lot of work for a variety of customers from around the world doing passenger to cargo conversions,” Stevens said.

“That’s where we take a passenger airplane and we turn it into a cargo aircraft.”

Future growth, Boeing business

Stevens explained they’ve made the decision to expand two of their hangars in Kelowna.

They will expand one of them through this year into early next year, and the other will take them until the better part of 2022.

“That’ll give us two more aircraft slots here in Kelowna, and over the next 12 months or so we’re probably going to add about another 100 jobs here into Kelowna in order to service, maintain, and modify those aircraft,” Stevens said.

“It’s exciting times again for us.”

In 2023, Boeing will open two new freighter conversion lines at KF Aerospace. This is due to the increase in global demand for freighters.

“KF Aerospace and our Boeing teammates at London Gatwick have the infrastructure, capabilities and expertise required to deliver market-leading Boeing Converted Freighters to our customers,” director of Boeing Converted Freighters, Jens Steinhagen said.

With almost 800 employees, some KF Aerospace staff members have been around for decades. This has provided a large amount of money for the local economy just in wages alone.

“We have a very solid wage and benefits program, and we would pay somewhere in the vicinity of about $60 million in wages a year to staff,” Stevens said.

“That’s a significant economic contributor to the community. It allows people to raise their families, [and] own a home.”

There are many job opportunities available for young people to pursue within KF, and not all require additional schooling.

“We have people that work with our parts in the parts counter, and we train you on the job.” Stevens said.

“Same thing with people who are doing administrative work, both in the hangars and in the offices.”

“We hire painters and what we call aircraft service technicians. All of those jobs basically require you to have completed high school, and then we’re going to train you on the job,” Stevens added.

High energy and passion

Stevens is clearly passionate about things, and it’s reflected across the company.

“One of the things that makes KF quite unique is the excitement of being in aviation. There's a certain exciting factor about working around airplanes,” Stevens said.

“It’s a high paced, high energy environment, and you get to work around a lot of really smart, highly skilled people, that are excelling at their craft in working on these aircraft”

“Never a boring place to work at all.”