🔒Joining other CT aeroparts makers, Kaman opens its own customer-support center

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A short distance from Kaman Corp.’s Bloomfield campus is the aerospace manufacturer’s newest addition to the legacy of one of Connecticut’s and America’s foremost aeronautics pioneers.

The company recently unveiled at its Kaman Aerospace unit, its first dedicated customer-service center at 6 East Newberry Road in Bloomfield.

It’s a facility that Kaman could very easily have located in Florida, or other locations where the company has operations, Kaman’s CEO says. Instead, Kaman chose to join other large Connecticut aerospace manufacturers with customer-service centers in the state.

In 2016, Sikorsky Aircraft opened its new customer-support center in Stratford. Neither rivals Pratt & Whitney’s support center in East Hartford, where life-sized versions of every commercial jet engine it makes are displayed.

Kaman Vice President Eric Remington says $1.3 million was spent outfitting the 6,000-square-foot building Kaman has owned since 1983, one of about a dozen commercial-industrial buildings hugging a ¼-mile strip of East Newberry Road.

From the outside, the neatly landscaped building, which was once used for storage, might go unnoticed, but for the blue “Kaman’’ nameplate out front.

But it’s what’s happening inside that drew Kaman Chairman, President and CEO Neal J. Keating and several dozen Kaman employees and local dignitaries to the facility on a recent sweltering July day.

Along with a classroom, meeting/conference-rooms and lounge space, the customer-service center features Kaman’s first-ever flight simulator for its K-MAX heavylift helicopter.

The center’s main training room brims with K-MAX components for which pilots and mechanics must be most familiar, like their composite rotor blades, drive-shaft and other moving parts, and avionics.

K-MAXs are in use worldwide for firefighting, logging, constructing powerlines, emergency response and humanitarian relief, Kaman says. Popular and reliable, K-MAXs often command a premium when resold — demand that prompted Kaman to revive K-MAX production in 2015 after shutting it down years earlier.

The K-MAX simulator was assembled mostly with off-the-shelf hardware and software, with help from Kaman chief pilot and ex-Navy flyer, Bill Hart, and his three-man pilot team, plus Kaman’s information-technology and engineering staffs.

A hydraulically driven, replica cockpit — with gauges, control levers and single seat from the K-MAX, and a panoramic viewing screen, with simulated air- and groundscapes and sound effects — gives trainees the sensation of lift-off, landing, hovering, turning, even crashing.

Some two- to three- dozen military and civilian pilots and mechanics annually come to Bloomfield, for pre-delivery training with Kaman Aerospace, said Darlene Smith, vice president of its Air Vehicles division. Its out-of-town visitors sleep, dine and sightsee in the area during their sometimes weeks-long visits.

Previously, Kaman allotted office space on its campus for customer training and support, Smith said, but eventually sought larger, more modern space.

Kaman also previously devoted several aircraft in its corporate fleet as trainers. That meant budgeting to repair and maintain its trainer fleet, Smith said. A flight simulator reduces the flight hours required to certify pilots, making it more cost effective.

The company never before had a K-MAX simulator, despite that its proprietary counter-rotor technology has been around since aeronautics engineer Charles H. Kaman devised it in the 1940s. He died in 2011 at age 91.

In 2015, Kaman revived K-MAX production in Bloomfield and delivered those first units two years later.

Kaman also produces the SH-2, a military helicopter used by a number of foreign governments, including Egypt, Peru, Poland and New Zealand. China has ordered K-MAXs to use in firefighting.

Keating said having the customer-service center in Connecticut affirms Kaman’s commitment to its customers and the state.