500 People Already Back At Work

In response to questions put forth by ANN, New Piper Aircraft has updated us as to the status of their return to full production... interrupted by the "charms" of Mother Nature's production of a series of hurricanes that have been plaguing the "sunshine" state.

New Piper's Mark Miller noted that, "We have been working diligently to restore our business operations in the wake of Hurricane Frances. To date, we have resumed delivery of aircraft and parts shipments and brought back half of our workforce - all in just a little over two weeks.

This has been a classic example of restoring business in the face of a natural disaster. The planning, management of resources and hard work by all the members of Team Piper who have been working - in some cases around the clock - has enabled us to save a great deal of time and heartache as we worked to bring back our employees as quickly as possible.

The first thing we did was bring in experts to assess the extent of our damage and to ensure that our buildings were structurally sound. From there, we brought in our maintenance and facilities people to start the tough work of digging out from under. Then we brought in team members who had the expertise and responsibility for resuming delivery of aircraft and parts shipments. At the same time, we moved rapidly to restore production.

We sustained enough damage that we had to move offices and parts of our assembly and production facilities to other locations on the New Piper campus in Vero Beach. Even so, we have been able to rebound quickly, bringing approximately 500 people back to work - the majority of whom are not management employees. Moreover, we continue to bring more people back to work every day.

It has been the hard work of Team Piper - management, staff and hourly workers - as well as help from our community and the New Piper dealer network that has enabled us to get back up and running as quickly as we have."

FMI: www.newpiper.com