Aircraft Specialists Acquires Sheltair FBO at Georgia's Gwinnett County Airport-Briscoe Field, Becomes Sole Operator

Aircraft Specialists has acquired the Sheltair facility at Georgia's Gwinnett County Airport-Briscoe Field (KLZU), making it the sole FBO at the airfield. Sheltair had won a request for proposals in 2023 to take over the former Gwinnett Aero facility, securing a 40-year lease that included a commitment to develop a new terminal and restaurant office building, work that had not been completed.

Aircraft Specialists will assume the remainder of Sheltair's lease and has announced plans to build a 9,300-sq-ft FBO terminal on the north side of the field, with groundbreaking scheduled for early next year. The new terminal will include passenger and pilot lounges, a snooze room, showers, a conference room, management offices, and a catering kitchen. The new facility will nearly triple the size of Aircraft Specialists' existing Jet Center terminal on the south side of the airport, which will be retained as a satellite facility, while the existing 3,200-sq-ft Sheltair terminal on the north side will be rented out to tenants.

As part of the acquisition, Aircraft Specialists added 150,000 sq ft of hangar space, capable of accommodating aircraft up to super-midsize jets, to its existing 100,000 sq ft. Sheltair said some of its KLZU staff joined Aircraft Specialists, while others transferred to other locations within the Sheltair chain. The CAA Preferred FBO operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, offering full-service Jet-A and 100LL fuel, and its Part 145 aircraft maintenance facility is staffed 24 hours a day, five days a week, with the maintenance team on call outside those hours.

Single-FBO consolidation at regional fields like KLZU typically follows an incumbent's unfulfilled buildout commitment: when a lease-holder cannot complete promised terminal or infrastructure work, the field's remaining operator or a new entrant tends to absorb the lease and inherit both the obligation and the opportunity. Here that meant Aircraft Specialists taking on the balance of a 40-year lease alongside a substantial hangar footprint expansion.

In FBO economics, hangar capacity and terminal size are direct proxies for the size of aircraft a facility can court; adding 150,000 sq ft capable of housing super-midsize jets signals a push toward larger-cabin transient and based traffic than the prior 100,000 sq ft alone supported. Retaining the original Jet Center terminal as a satellite site, rather than closing it, also preserves redundancy across the field.

What remains to be settled is the groundbreaking timeline for the new terminal, planned for early next year, and how quickly the retained Sheltair staff integrate into Aircraft Specialists' operations. The pace of that buildout will show whether the sole-operator structure at KLZU can support both the promised amenities and continuous fuel and maintenance service levels already in place.