On a small airfield in southwestern Pennsylvania, far from the scale and noise of the industry’s largest completion centers, PAC International has spent five decades proving that capability does not always announce itself through size.
The facility looks exactly like what it is: a working shop that has grown in stages, each addition reflecting another chapter in the company’s evolution. Inside, aircraft arrive with one identity and often leave with another. A VIP helicopter becomes an air medical platform. A law enforcement aircraft receives new mission systems. A tired airframe is stripped, inspected, rebuilt, and returned to service, ready for its next assignment.
For PAC International — officially Paradigm Aerospace Corporation — the mission has always been practical: do the job, solve the problem, and deliver an aircraft ready for its next undertaking.
Today, as a subsidiary of Metro Aviation, that role has expanded. PAC has become a vital northeastern extension of one of the industry’s most recognized names in helicopter completions and air medical operations, while maintaining the personality of the close-knit operation that first took shape on the airfield in 1976.
From a grass strip to a global footprint
PAC’s story began as Western Pennsylvania Helicopter Services, a small maintenance operation supporting Bell helicopters throughout the region. Director of administration Dayna Cortazzo-Wahl traces the company’s origins to George Wagner, who built a small hangar and began maintaining aircraft used by coal companies and other local operators.
Maintenance was the company’s first identity, providing the foundation for each new chapter in PAC’s story. As the business grew, so did its reach. In 1986, Helicopter Aviation Services Corporation, better known as HAS Corporation, was established at the same location, expanding into helicopter sales, completions, customization, and refurbishment.
Cortazzo-Wahl never envisioned a career in aviation when she joined the company in 1989. In fact, she had been sent there to help find someone else for the position.
“I wasn’t looking for a job,” she recalled. “I had one!”
But after several visits and conversations, she accepted the role. Nearly 40 years later, Cortazzo-Wahl remains woven into the fabric of the company.
At the time, HAS primarily bought and sold Bell helicopters. Customization soon became a natural extension of that business. Customers purchasing aircraft wanted interiors, paint, equipment, and configurations tailored to their needs, and PAC’s predecessor recognized the opportunity.
“We always did maintenance throughout our history,” Cortazzo-Wahl said. “That was our base that we started with.”
Through the 1990s, the company became a significant player in helicopter completions, supporting private owners, international customers, law enforcement agencies, fire rescue operators, electronic news gathering aircraft, and more.
Cortazzo-Wahl remembers completing aircraft for customers as far away as Thailand and Kuwait. That growing international reach eventually helped shape the PAC International name.
Surviving the dark years
The early 2000s tested the company in ways that continue to shape its culture. After years of growth, the opening of Bell’s new sales and completion center in Piney Flats, Tennessee, dealt the business a significant blow, contributing to its bankruptcy in 2002.
PAC emerged the following year as a reorganized company when Cortazzo-Wahl, along with director of maintenance Ed Wahl, and Japanese businessman Tommy Nishimura, acquired the business and fought to keep it alive.
The post-9/11 aviation environment was challenging, and the company’s historic dependence on a single manufacturer became a vulnerability as Bell expanded its own completion capabilities. For decades, PAC and its predecessors had been almost exclusively focused on Bell helicopters. After the bankruptcy, that had to change.
Wahl, who joined the company in 1997 as a sheet metal technician before becoming director of maintenance, acknowledged the shift was necessary but not easy.
“Before bankruptcy, we were strictly Bell helicopter,” he said. “Coming out, we realized that we had to spread our wings and start to work on different airframes.”
That meant new manuals, tooling, training, and ways of working. The shop began accepting aircraft from nearly every major manufacturer. It was a steep learning curve, but it also created the diversification that would later make PAC more attractive to Metro Aviation.
Customer loyalty proved critical to the company’s survival. Wahl recalled that even through its most difficult period, the company lost only one customer. Cortazzo-Wahl described the period as the “year of darkness,” but said it also deepened her sense of responsibility to the business and its employees.
“I want to run this business like it’s my own,” she said. “I care about our people and our customers.”
The Metro turning point
By 2012, Metro Aviation was looking for a maintenance and support facility in the Northeast. According to Metro Aviation chief operating officer Kenny Morrow, the need had already been identified.
“We built the business plan and were ready to locate a facility and start hiring staff,” Morrow said. Then Metro learned PAC might be available.
The fit was obvious. PAC had a facility, a strong reputation, experienced technicians, and a long history in completions and maintenance. For Metro, acquiring PAC was not only faster than building a new operation from scratch, it also provided the opportunity to build on an established name in the industry.
“After evaluating the business, we decided that purchasing PAC was a much shorter path to getting where we needed to be,” Morrow said. “Plus, PAC had built a great reputation over the years that we were able to leverage and use to easily continue the momentum of both companies.”
For PAC, the acquisition changed everything. Cortazzo-Wahl describes Metro’s arrival as “a breath of fresh air.” After years of fighting to find work, meet payroll, and keep the business afloat, PAC suddenly had stability, a steady flow of aircraft, and access to Metro’s resources, engineering expertise, and customer base.
“There was no turning back,” she said. “Best thing that ever happened to us.”
Projects became steadier, the mix of aircraft broadened, and emergency medical services (EMS) completions and upgrades grew substantially. Metro’s expertise in air medical interiors and supplemental type certificates (STCs) gave PAC access to a broader range of mission equipment and installation capabilities.
The partnership also preserved what made PAC valuable. Metro did not erase the company’s identity. Instead, it gained an established northeastern completion and maintenance center with experienced people and a culture that closely aligned with its own.
Morrow said PAC has embraced Metro’s “culture of safety, quality, innovation, and customer service,” while continuing to support both Metro’s customers and its own. He credits PAC’s leadership team with helping integrate the two companies and said Metro continues to invest in PAC’s people, capabilities, and facilities because of the important role the Pennsylvania operation plays within the organization.
More directly, Morrow added, “Metro could not have grown nor continue to grow had it not been for PAC.”
A one-stop shop for rotorcraft
Ask PAC’s leadership what the company does today, and the answer comes more easily if the question is reversed: What doesn’t PAC do?
Wahl has a straightforward answer: “We’re a one-stop shop for the rotary-wing industry. If we can get it approved, we’ll get it installed.”
PAC’s capabilities include maintenance, completions, refurbishment, paint, avionics, sheet metal, composites, interiors, component support, and mission equipment integration. The company remains a Bell Customer Service Facility and an FAA Part 145 repair station while also supporting Airbus, Leonardo, Sikorsky, MD, and other platforms.
The work spans a broad range of missions, but EMS has become especially prominent under Metro’s ownership. PAC installs Metro STC equipment and performs upgrades and refurbishments on aircraft supporting air medical programs across the country. According to Wahl, only two companies perform Metro STC installations: Metro Aviation and PAC.
Project manager Phillip Woods sees that work from the aircraft level. Woods joined PAC in 2022 as a mechanic after a career that included fixed-wing maintenance, Chinook and Sikorsky helicopter repair, and more than a decade with an air medical operator. He later moved into project management, where he now guides aircraft from initial planning through delivery.
For Woods, the role is an opportunity to draw on that broad experience.
“I feel that with my experience, I have some insight on how to complete these aircraft,” he explained. “Well ahead of the helicopter’s arrival, my work has already begun. I am building the work order, reviewing drawings, ordering parts, and coordinating with the completion teams two to three months in advance.”
Once the aircraft arrives at PAC, the scope can vary considerably. Some Metro aircraft come in for refurbishment, avionics upgrades, or medical interior installations. Others arrive as VIP aircraft from overseas and leave as air medical platforms, requiring interior removal, refurbishment, Metro modifications, wiring, avionics, paint, and more before returning to service.
The job is equal parts planning and troubleshooting. Parts delays can quickly complicate the schedule.
“Sometimes we need items that are a year out, so I’ve got to find a different avenue,” Woods said.
Cortazzo-Wahl said the parts room is one of the areas driving PAC’s current expansion. With more aircraft, more models, and more predictable program work flowing through Metro, the company has to stage more parts earlier than ever before.
The challenge today is no longer finding enough aircraft — it is finding enough space, components, and personnel to keep up with the work already on the schedule.
Built by people who know the stakes
PAC currently employs about 58 people, many of whom have spent decades with the company. That experience is one of PAC’s greatest strengths, but it also presents one of its biggest challenges for the future.
Wahl said he recently reviewed the employee roster and realized just how many people have been with the organization for decades. The next step, he said, is preparing the next generation.
Like many aviation maintenance organizations, PAC faces a tight labor market. Its response has been to develop talent from within. As a Part 145 repair station, PAC can hire employees without an airframe and powerplant (A&P) certificate, train them under experienced technicians, and help them build the hands-on experience needed to qualify for their A&P exams.
Some come straight out of high school. Others arrive from the military with aviation experience and need a pathway into the civilian certification system. What they learn is practical, hands-on, and varied. Wahl wants young technicians trained not only to complete today’s work, but to eventually carry the company forward.
For Woods, the purpose behind that work is never far from mind. A helicopter may be sitting quietly in a hangar in Pennsylvania today, but tomorrow it could be landing on a highway, in a farm field, or at a hospital with a patient whose outcome depends on that aircraft being ready.
“We don’t get to see the ultimate action,” Woods said. “But we know we need to deliver a product that is equipped to perform.”
Growing into the future
PAC’s future is being shaped by the same forces that have defined its past: adaptation, customer demand, and the need to stay ahead in an ever-changing rotorcraft industry.
The facility is expanding for the first time since Metro’s acquisition, driven by increasing aircraft volume, growing parts storage requirements, and the need to support additional work. Cortazzo-Wahl sees continued growth built around people, capability, and care. The challenge, she said, is to keep evolving without losing the culture that carried the company through its most difficult years.
“I think we will continue growing,” she said. “We will continue getting new, qualified team members here, growing them, and fostering our business, with the goal of pushing PAC well into the future.”
Wahl sees opportunities in new aircraft types, including emerging vertical-lift platforms in which Metro is already investing. Whether those aircraft eventually make their way through PAC or not, the reasoning is straightforward: the company has the space, experience, location, and workforce to adapt as the industry evolves.
That has been PAC’s story from the beginning. It started with Bell maintenance at a small Pennsylvania airfield. It grew into sales, completions, and international customization. It survived bankruptcy by diversifying. It became part of the Metro family and evolved into a key support facility.
Through every chapter of the company’s history, one constant has been the talented people in the building. They kept the lights on, learned new aircraft, trained the next generation of technicians, and turned customer ideas into reality.
PAC International may no longer be the small Bell-focused shop that began in 1976, but it has not lost the practical DNA of that original operation. It remains a place where helicopters arrive with a problem to solve, a mission to fulfill, or a second life ahead of them, and leave ready to answer the call.