The new 20,000-square-foot helicopter blade maintenance shop at Midwest Aerospace is nearly half the size of a football field, minus the end zone and a few yards of turf.
It’s a massive expansion of company headquarters in Lowell, Indiana, built with a clear purpose in mind.
“There’s a demand for good-quality, and faster turn times [for] blades in the market,” said Joseph L. Giannini, the company’s vice president.
“We’re going to be able to turn it faster, and for a more affordable price, as well. The quality is going to be better than pretty much anybody else on the market.”
The Midwest Aerospace blade shop opens to the public May 1, and will offer non-destructive testing, full maintenance and overhaul, and x-ray testing of several Bell helicopter models, plus Airbus H125s and Sikorsky Black Hawks.
This is part of an ongoing strategy to make the family-owned corporation a one-stop shop for Bell products, and to capture some of the overflow traffic from other maintenance providers.
“We partner with Rotorcraft [Repair and Manufacturing] out in Arkansas,” said Giannini, the son of Midwest president and founder Louis P. Giannini.
“They’re overloaded, so this gives us an opportunity to kind of help them out, and also take care of our own blades. Midwest itself sells, brokers and fits over 100 blades a year, so if we can do more of that in-house, that will be advantageous for us.”
Midwest is hiring 10 new technicians to work in the new shop, with at least 100 years of combined industry experience. They will complement staff at the company’s other locations in Tucson and Gilbert, Arizona; and Naples, Florida.
The Tucson and Naples locations service Lycoming T53 engines for Bell UH-1, 204, 205, and Eagle Single helicopters, with the Gilbert location as a repair station for the Bell AH-1, UH-1, 204, 205, 212, and 412 rotables.
“The only thing we’re missing is avionics,” noted Giannini. “It gives us a wide array of capabilities.”
Construction on the new blade shop in Lowell began in September 2025, and staff moved into the facility in late April.
Along with overhaul and repair, the shop is also an authorized installer of Rotorcraft Repair and Manufacturing’s proprietary dragon skin extreme (DSX) erosion guard coating.
“It’ll just be us and Rotorcraft [as] the only ones that are installing it,” said Giannini. “So it’s pretty exciting. It’s going to prevent corrosion issues that all these blades have on their leading edges.”
“And we’re going to be offering repair kits, so if something does happen with the coating—you hit a rock real hard, or something—it can be repaired in the field.”
Ultimately, the shop is seen as part of the solution to a bottleneck of required blade maintenance—and there’s a great deal of anticipation ahead of the official opening.
“We’re putting a lot of work in to get it done, and we’re excited to get it going,” said Giannini. “[We’re going] to get it started as fast as we can.”
