![]() ![]() But the big news in the adversary air, or ADAIR, training world is a huge new opportunity for ADAIR companies to take over essentially all of the Air Force’s adversary training flying work - approximately 40,000 hours a year worth of adversary air time - over a 10-year period beginning next year. Though Parker is an Air Force man at heart, and though ATAC has done work for the Air Force and Marines from time to time, the Navy always has been ATAC’s primary customer. There’s lots of opportunity ahead for us.”īy next summer, Parker expects the first 13 or so F1s to be flying in support of U.S. “We started this industry 22 years ago, which seems like a long time, but we’re really just now beginning to grow as an industry. “We, essentially, are standing up a small new air force of our own,” Parker said, only half-jokingly. The icing on the cake, he said, is that Textron-owned sister company Bell is headquartered only a few miles away and operates its own training facility at Alliance. Parker said ATAC chose the Alliance location as home base for its F1 fleet because its mid-continent location means it can deploy planes quickly easily to any training location in the nation and because of the overwhelming abundance of highly skilled and experienced aircraft maintainers, technicians, engineers and program administrators available in the aviation-dominated North Texas market. That facility also will become the work home of 200 or more maintainers, pilots and administrators. Draken mirage f1 plus#Eventually all 45 of the F1s that ATAC plans to restore to flying condition, plus the remaining F1s in that French Air Force batch and all the added spare parts and engines, will be based at Alliance Airport in what the company is calling its Adversary Center of Excellence. That’s 63 planes in total, plus more than 150 spare engines and millions of spare parts. Last year ATAC, backed by Textron’s money and Textron CEO Scott Donnelly’s thirst for larger revenues, ATAC bought the French Air Force’s entire fleet of Dassault Mirage F1s. Indeed, that’s why Parker and other ATAC and Textron leaders were in Fort Worth, Texas, recently. Although Parker still very much enjoys the flying part of his job, the businessman part almost certainly will be consuming an ever larger share of his time. Navy, Air Force, Marine and even Army contracts currently or soon-to-be up for bid, ATAC and its principal competitors Draken International, TacAir and Top Aces are gearing up to bid for and win big shares of that work and revenue. And with multiple multi-million-dollar U.S. ![]() and international allied war fighters better prepared to fend off or take in enemy air assets. ![]() Parker now sits atop a civilian organization that owns more than 90 fighter jets, all of which are dedicated to making U.S. military pilots is bound to get harder and harder. However, getting away from his desk and away from meetings with investors, employees and, now, executives of ATAC’s new parent company, Textron, so that he can fly as a mock-bad guy against frontline U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and veteran of both operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm launched the world’s very first adversary air training company called Airborne Tactical Advantage Company (ATAC), Parker has been just as much a pilot as he has been a business man. Dressed in a stylish light gray “skinny” suit, he was standing at a podium under an event tent (bracketed by two parked fighter jets), delivering a short speech of thanks to the three dozen or so local officials and media types who turned out for his company’s groundbreaking ceremonies at bustling Alliance Airport.Īs proof that you can take the pilot out of the cockpit, but can’t take the cockpit out of the pilot, JD (the nickname/call sign that Parker typically goes by) couldn’t stop himself from mentioning that only the day before he’d been flying old IAI Kfir fighters at NAS Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, against U.S. Jeffrey Parker certainly looked the part of dynamic, young CEO. ![]()
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