Story ID: 040
Legacy Tails: Hawker 4000
By: Mark Huber
Caption: The super-midsize Hawker 4000 business jet finds maintenance refuge after a limited production run. 
Word Count: 1119
Kelly Lousch calls them her “little children.”
Lousch is the director of Mid-Continent Aviation Services (MCAS) in Wichita and her “children” are the surviving fleet of 65 Hawker 4000 super-midsize business jet aircraft. MCAS is currently the leading independent support provider for the aircraft following Hawker Beechcraft’s bankruptcy and the subsequent fire sale acquisition of its assets by Textron Aviation for $1.4 billion in 2014.
In 1996, when the manufacturer unveiled its plans for the Hawker 4000 (initially called the “Horizon”), the twinjet super-midsize market was ripe for the taking. The 4000 featured an innovative filament-wound carbon fiber fuselage mated to aluminum wings. It can typically seat two pilots and eight to nine passengers and can fly more than 3,300 nm at 447 ktas with four passengers or about 3,040 nm at 470 ktas with six passengers.
By the time the 4000 finally made its way to customers in 2008, competitive products from Bombardier and Gulfstream had substantial head starts and had been flying for years, and fractional companies canceled early large orders for the model. Meanwhile, parent Raytheon Aircraft foundered and was eventually acquired with loads of leverage by an investment banking consortium. It renamed the company Hawker Beechcraft in 2006, a halcyon time for the corporate jet business that would abruptly end a couple of years later with the worldwide economic crash. Bankruptcy was inevitable and when it came in 2012, the value of the 4000 aircraft, which sold new initially for $19.6 million, plummeted to little more than the value of the engines bolted onto the back—about $3 million. Some traded hands for as little as $1 million.
Lousch, then-director of products and technical support on the 4000, and much of her Hawker Beechcraft team that worked on it were dismissed. Textron Aviation shuttered the Little Rock service and completion center that largely supported it, declined to resume production of the aircraft, and instead took some of the 4000’s technology and morphed some of it into a new mostly metal aircraft called the Cessna Citation Longitude. Many 4000 customers were understandably furious.Mid-Continent Aviation Services in Wichita, Kansas, has become the go-to shop for Hawker 4000 maintenance.
“They rode the rollercoaster of [Hawker Beechcraft’s] bankruptcy and took a huge hit,” Lousch said. “It created a lot of distrust and dissatisfaction. They had gone in on this new flagship product and then [product] support was just yanked away from them. Some of them shed their aircraft after they had taken full deprecation after seven years. Those customers were angry and told Textron, ‘Don’t try to come to me and sell me a [Citation] Longitude or Latitude because you didn’t support us.’”
The situation created an opportunity for buyers looking to get into a super-midsize bizjet for essentially peanuts and an opportunity for Lousch and her team of 30 at MCAS to support it. “We’re kind of a one-stop-shop. We can do everything from unscheduled maintenance and AOG support, technical support, scheduled maintenance, modifications, and refurbishment,” Lousch said. “Being located here in Wichita, we have a lot of people with OEM backgrounds.”
While Textron Aviation still supports the 4000, that support is understandably not what it would be if more had been produced, but because of the legalities of parts certification, certain components for the aircraft, such as windshields, can only be bought directly through Textron and not from the component manufacturer. Textron also has taken on the tasks of making sure the aircraft gets certain updates such as service bulletins for ADS-B Out and controller-pilot datalink communications. And hourly maintenance programs are still available for the engines and auxiliary power unit from Pratt & Whitney and the Primus Epic avionics from Honeywell.
Lousch said owners who scooped up “bargain-priced” 4000s typically run into trouble if they don’t fully understand the maintenance requirement of the aircraft and its handful of idiosyncrasies. “You’re still supporting an 18-to-20-million-dollar aircraft, right?”
One of the counterintuitive issues to look for on a 4000 is corrosion where the carbon-fiber fuselage sections are joined with metal splice ring bands. “A lot of people have the assumption that it’s composite so corrosion is not a problem. In the majority of airframes, that’s correct,” Lousch said. “But on the 4000 paint can crack around these rings due to the thermal expansion of the rings causing the paint in these areas to crack over time, pressurization, and temperature cycles. And when the cracks grow they can allow moisture to express to the metal. It’s an area of concern that we focus on. If we see some surface corrosion or paint bubbling we knock it out immediately and repaint it.”
Landing gear and brakes are another tripping point. Early serial number aircraft have landing gear that must undergo heavy service or replacement every 3,200 cycles. Textron is working to double that interval, but for some customers, gear overhaul can be a $300,000 hit—or more. Brakes are another issue. “You could be paying $500,000 for a set of new brakes,” Lousch cautioned.
Prices of parts, in general, on the 4000 are typically higher than other competitive aircraft in part as a byproduct of how Hawker Beechcraft negotiated with the 4000’s suppliers, Lousch noted.
“Parts pricing is through the roof. Some of these parts are unique to the 4000 and they are provided by vendors who were hurt very badly in the bankruptcy. The 4000 was a risk-sharing program and a lot of these vendors provided parts below the cost of production in the hope that they were going to make it up in the aftermarket. And once the bankruptcy hits, all these contracts are null and void. So the only way for these vendors to recoup their investment is to really jack up prices,” Lousch said. The situation spurs the need for creative solutions to customer support issues, she said. “It’s kind of like a game of Whac-A-Mole. You’re constantly monitoring the supply of the ten to fifteen things” the fleet needs the most.
But overall, customers who maintain their aircraft properly typically experience good dispatch reliability, Lousch remarked. “Any aircraft ownership isn’t without risk. But when you look at the opportunity, the 4000 lets you get into a super-midsize for $5 million or less. It’s definitely not for everybody, but it is still a good aircraft that is relatively young. It is a fantastically designed aircraft.”