By Andrew Webb
Journal Staff Writer
Eclipse Aviation hit another milestone Monday, breaking ground on a 52,000-square-foot jet assembly building.
The new building, dubbed Sunport 11, is slated for completion in June. It will give the company about 340,000 square feet of manufacturing, storage, welding, painting and office space southeast of Downtown.
That's enough to take the company through its first few years of production.
Eclipse plans to move its operation to larger facilities at Double Eagle II airport on the West Side in the next five years or so.
Eclipse recently announced plans to hire another 550 employees in the next year, bringing its total work force to 1,000 as it ramps up to begin mass production of the $1.3 million Eclipse 500 jet this year.
President and CEO Vern Raburn said Eclipse has nearly 2,400 orders.
First deliveries are expected to begin late in the second quarter of this year, once the company has achieved Federal Aviation Administration certification.
Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., helped turn the first ceremonial shovels of dirt for the building, which will be near the intersection of Gibson and Broadway SE.
"The support you've given us couldn't be greater," Raburn said during the groundbreaking. "Everything that we were promised by the government ... has been delivered on."
Domenici congratulated the company for persevering through its critical first few years.
"Lesser people would have given up at such a long, long project," he said.
Bingaman called the firm's expansion "a great boon to our state."
"I don't think there's anything as positive as Eclipse going on here or anywhere else in the country," he said.
Waterman Inc., the Albuquerque company that built the Friction Stir Welding Center and leases it to Eclipse, will also build and own the new building. Eclipse will use it to rivet together Eclipse 500 fuselages after welding processes are finished.
The bodies will then be taken across Interstate 25 for final assembly and painting at the Sunport, where wings and engines will be attached, interiors completed, and the aircraft readied for customer delivery.
The new assembly building will likely be the last built for Eclipse in southeast Albuquerque, said Michael McConnell, vice president of sales and product support for the company.
The city is building a hangar, called Sunport 3, which it will lease to Eclipse as a paint center. That area is also slated for completion in June and will be used to paint airliners when Eclipse moves to the West Side, Raburn said.
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