Fast 5: Duncan Aviation’s New President

Duncan Aviation is transitioning its senior leadership. Jeff Lake, president and CEO until Jan. 1, retains the chief executive title and Mike Minchow, formerly COO, took on the president’s role. Minchow talks about the transition and his outlook for 2025.

How are you transitioning into this new role?

It’s honestly been a smooth transition so far, in part because succession planning is big in our organization, whether it’s at the senior leadership level or managers, assistant managers, team leads or crew leads. This transition has also been in the works for a while, so I’ve been able to work alongside Jeff (Lake).

I’ve been on the senior team for 10 years now so I’ve had the benefit of not only working with Jeff over the last five years as he was in the president’s role, but even before that, working with Aaron (Hilkemann) and learning and mentoring under both Aaron and Jeff, our two previous presidents. I’ve learned a lot from them. They also delegated certain responsibilities to me over time, which helped the smooth transition.

You’ve had an interesting career path—you joined the company in 1993 when you were working on your Masters of Architecture degree—and now you are president. What career advice do you have based on your journey?

My new employee orientation class in 1993 included two people—along with Lori Johnson (Duncan Aviation’s marketing communications manager). Our most recent employee orientation class included about 20 people! That shows the growth of our organization and the industry over the last 30 years. As I look back over my career, I’d encourage people to ask lots of questions and get involved. Having come out of an architecture background, I didn’t know anything about aviation when I started. My first airplane ride was in one of our Bonanzas here at Duncan when I started. I fell in love with aviation, but that came from asking a lot of questions and trying new things. I went from design into sales, then program management for a while, back into sales, then over to operations, where I eventually became COO. Don’t be afraid to get outside your comfort zone. Probably the biggest influence on my career was identifying some key leaders who I wanted to model some specific behaviors, such as Jeannine Falter, who was our [vice president] of sales. I always admired how she remained calm and professional, event in difficult situations. I’ve tried to emulate that.

What trends are you seeing in the business today?

Connectivity is huge for our avionics installations business, whether it’s Starlink or Gogo. Airframe and engine maintenance continue to be big drivers. The backlog continues to push further and further because there’s just a ton of demand now and not enough capacity—both from labor and hangar capacity.

We opened maintenance hangars in Feb. 2024 in Lincoln (Nebraska) and Battle Creek (Michigan) and tried to position ourselves with where the market is going with the ultra-long-range aircraft.

In 2025, we’re focused on finishing out the last expansion that we know of today—a paint hangar in Lincoln that will hopefully wrap up the end of the year. We also have our Pratt & Whitney engine shop expansion, which we’re really excited about. That will get us more involved in overhauls and hot-section inspections on the Pratt 300- and 500-series engines. Our plan is to finish that the end of 2025 or early 2026 and grow into that market. Beyond that, we’re going to pause on expansion plans and fine-tune our processes, procedures and team structure.

Will the new engine shop include a test cell? How much is Duncan investing in the paint hangar and new engine shop?

We have a test cell in Lincoln, but we will be adding a second one dedicated to the Pratt engines. In the interim, we’ll send the engines to Pratt’s West Virginia facility for test runs. The new test cell should arrive in the fall, and hopefully we’ll be able to do the first engine correlations in early 2026.

We’re investing $28 million for the paint hangar and $30 million for the engine building, test cell and tooling. We’ll also be investing in rental engines, which will probably add another $10 million. Atec is manufacturing the test cell.

You mentioned a longer backlog. How far in advance do people need to book a maintenance slot?

For larger inspections or events that require sending out landing gear or other longer-term planning, it’s getting further and further out. My recommendation to customers is to start planning sooner than you think. Reach out to talk about planning those longer lead-time items. The industry is still working through supply chain and labor challenges that haven’t gone away post-pandemic. We’re trying to navigate our way through those to make sure that we don’t over-commit and to make sure that the downtime we offer, we hit. For larger checks, we encourage customers to book at least 12-18 months in advance. We’re booking projects into 2026 and 2027. We’ve never seen this backlog.