Joe Wehrle Director of Aviation Baker Aviation By Marj Rose

Joe Wehrle’s technical expertise in Hawker and Beechcraft products over the years has earned him the label “troubleshooter extraordinaire” when it comes to maintaining these or just about any make and model of business jet.

All that troubleshooting, testing, inspecting, and evaluating the airworthiness of aircraft (like in a pre-buy inspection) are all parts of his job that Joe enjoys the most. These are what got him hooked on the aircraft maintenance world early on — and he never looked back.

Early Inspiration

As a child, Wehrle and his father who was a navigator in the U.S. Air Force used to spend afternoons watching airplanes land at local

airports in Houston. As the family moved around from Toronto, Canada, to Buffalo, NY, and then back to Houston, Wehrle and his dad were fascinated with watching airplanes. A family friend arranged for a tour of an air traffic control tower. These activities were Wehrle’s first exposure to aviation; little did he know at the time that they would play an important role in his choice to pursue a career in aircraft maintenance.

Many years passed, and Wehrle didn’t really give aviation any consideration as a career choice before heading off to college. He declared a major in chemical engineering. After two years he became bored with classroom studies and lectures and decided that this college curriculum was not for him. He was then faced with a big question that almost all of us must face sooner or later — what do I want to be when I grow up? He knew he didn’t want to be stuck inside behind a desk and felt he had a knack for fixing things.

As he was flipping through a career catalog one day, he saw a program describing the aircraft technician/A&P license program at a local trade school in Houston. He thought about the challenge of main taining airplanes and the vivid memories of him and his dad watching all those aircraft land at all those different airports came rushing back. The fond memory of the air traffic control tower tour from long ago also came back to him, so Wehrle took this as a sign. He felt that he was meant to be an aircraft mechanic so he enrolled in the A&P technical school just as soon as he could.

An aviation career takes flight

Wehrle began his aircraft maintenance career at Atlantic Aviation. He was tasked with all kinds of line maintenance, helping out wherever they needed him. He loved every minute of it, especially when it was pay day.

“It was exhilarating and I was learning something new every day,” he says. “Then getting my own place with my own money was a great feeling and being a mechanic gave me that independence right out of school.”

As time went on, Wehrle kept looking for new challenges and eventually moved on to TXI Aviation where he helped maintain a fleet of five charter aircraft. Management depended on him heavily to keep all the aircraft flying. He became a Hawker and Westwind maintenance instructor at SimuFlite in the late 1980s. Still trying to carve out his own niche, Wehrle decided his next career venture needed to be something he could have more control over, and that is when he decided to launch his own maintenance business: Aeromech.

In his first supervisory role, Wehrle was also the owner of the company. His employees were contractors. Finding people that were hard working, experienced and dedicated was not always easy. Wehrle often lost money on jobs when the people he hired didn’t stack up, but he continued to demand quality. He wanted people to keep calling Aeromech when they needed their aircraft fixed right the first time. Wehrle knew that service and honesty were areas that could make a difference and help him grow his business with more loyal customers.

Mentoring has always been important to Wehrle. Early on at Aeromech, he took the opportunity to find aspiring young technicians and train them, coach them and share important tips of the trade with them while growing his business. Many of his protégés are highly sought after today due to the vast experience and exposure they received under his guidance. Wehrle takes pride in the fact that he played a part in their successful careers, as many of them hold senior positions for major MROs and flight departments as directors and chiefs of maintenance.

Wehre thrived in the entrepreneurial environment and liked organizing his crews and scheduling all the work out for weeks in advance. Under his leadership, Aeromech flourished for 22 years.

One of Aeromech customers was Baker Aviation, a family-owned charter/management business based in Fort Worth, TX. Wehrle and his team impressed the owner, Stanley Baker Jr., and his son, Stanley “Stan” Baker III, with their keen troubleshooting ability and quality maintenance. The extent of the Bakers’ satisfaction led to the purchase of Aeromech in 2011 and soon thereafter, Baker Aviation added maintenance services to its business and moved into a hangar at Addison Airport.

The Bakers retained much of Wehrle’s team from Aeromech. They engaged Wehrle as an engineering consultant to begin with. As the maintenance jobs started coming in, Wehrle became the new DOM and started using his relationships and status to attract more customers. Baker expanded from one hangar into a second one only months after opening its doors, then grew into a third hangar in early 2013. Today its facilities total 25,400 square feet in size.

“We have a lot going on here at Baker, and we are filling our three hangars with Challengers, Hawkers, Citations, Lear Jets and recently a Falcon 2000, so we have a nice diversity and we are building on our reputation in the industry,” Wehrle tells D.O.M. magazine.

Job challenges

Wehrle has encountered administrative challenges on the job. At Aeromech, he had to bid for the jobs, take care of billing and invoicing, and collect payments. At Baker, an infrastructure is in place to manage these financial processes. This allows Wehrle to concentrate on other job facets like meeting customer deadlines and dealing with the idiosyncrasies of numerous governing authorities.

One of the areas of expertise that reflects Wehrle’s expertise is in the pre-buy area. This has helped him get to where he is today is his thorough understanding and knowledge of the regulations, compliance, and AD conformity. Wehrle recommends that all aspiring DOMs take this area seriously and try and become as informed as possible on all the regulations that impact aircraft airworthiness.

Wehrle believes aircraft maintenance is a “love it or leave it” type of business. “The aircraft maintenance business is tough and very competitive when you can lose a large bid by $2,000 to a guy down the street that just threw up his shingle,” says Wehrle. “There are guys out there moonlighting from their day jobs and are all competing for the same work, so it always comes back to building a business around service, honesty and reputation, and that is what we are doing here at Baker. Years ago, I based my business on bringing the technicians to the customer with mobile services, and we also do that here. But it is interesting to see that most OEMs today are operating mobile truck services to support their customers remotely. So we all recognize that this type of service sells, and now as a smaller third-party provider, we have to step it up a notch and continue to look for ways to improve and differentiate our service. And we will.”

Wehrle still enjoys the everyday challenges, especially when a good troubleshooting challenge comes along or one of his favorite customers calls with an inspection or pre-buy need. He finds these relationships rewarding because they demonstrate trust in Wehrle to fix their multi-million dollar assets, and they keep coming back.

Wehrle’s ambition is to become a designated airworthiness representative (DAR) and travel around the country to perform evaluations and determine the airworthiness of various business jets. The next time you see this troubleshooter extraordinaire, who knows? He might be wearing that FAA/DAR patch on his shirt.