Camarillo Aircraft-Builder Avtek to Relocate to Alabama

Avtek Corp., a Camarillo firm that may someday hire hundreds of employees to build a new corporate airplane, has been wooed away from Ventura County.

“We won’t have the exact schedule worked out until late this year, but the decision has regretfully been made,” said Robert Adickes, the company’s founder and president.

He said he has accepted an offer from Alabama to finance a production plant in Bay Minette, a suburb of Mobile. The factory will be built on a 100-acre site adjoining an airport, he added.

Other states, including Illinois and Pennsylvania, had courted Avtek in the hope that its Avtek 400 aircraft would be successful and create 1,000 or more jobs.

The company has also struck deals with the governments of Singapore and Denmark to set up assembly plants in those countries, Adickes said.

“I’d love to stay in Southern California. This is where airplanes are envisioned and designed, but you can’t build them here,” Adickes said. “Because of workers’ comp and other problems, labor costs are simply too high.”

In the near term, the job loss from Avtek’s move is not great. Adickes said his privately held firm’s payroll is “quite small,” but he would not say how many employees he has.

Avtek says it has more than 20 prospective distributors and 110 orders for its twin-fanjet plane. At a price of $1.75 million each, that could result in more than $190 million in future sales.

Adickes, a retired TWA pilot, formed Avtek in Redondo Beach in 1980 and moved the company to Camarillo two years later.

A prototype of the Avtek 400 is stored at Camarillo Airport. The plane, made mostly of plastic composites, is said to be highly fuel-efficient. It seats six to 10 people and is capable of reaching speeds of 400 m.p.h.

In addition to Adickes, investors in the company include Dow Chemical, Nomura Securities and the government of Finland. Another major backer is Du Pont, which produces Kevlar, the material used in much of the plane. The investors have put $27.5 million into Avtek.

Adickes said he will maintain a transition office in Camarillo “for a while” after the move to Alabama. “We’ll still be using California designers and engineers, but on a contract basis only,” he said.