At the beginning of last month Gary St. Germain’s Corporate Air business was just getting off the ground, literally. But after September 11, a major portion of St. Germain’s niche aviation business was brought to a halt.
St. Germain, who runs a traffic-reporting pilot service in Rhode Island, sustained a severe setback after the Federal Aviation Administra-tion’s ban on certain aviation activities, such as news reporting, blimps and banner towing.
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The ban was imposed until October 1, when it was lifted with restrictions. St. Germain estimates he lost as much as $1,000 for every day he or his pilots were not in the air.
Thanks to a $15,000 emergency loan from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, St. Germain weathered the storm.
The EDC has allocated $500,000 for loans to businesses affected by the terrorists’attack. So far, Corporate Air and seven other companies have received grants.
The program, created in two days by Senior Financial Program Administrator Anthony Scolavino and Financial Program Administrator Philomena Teixeira, was inquired about by some 32 businesses, from which the EDC received 10 applications.
“They’re all across the board,” said EDC Director Thomas Schumpert about the types of businesses that applied for the grant.
Scolavino said the grants, which can be up to $15,000, were not for everyone.
“It’s not something where we just signed them up,” he said. “It’s not a giveaway program; it’s short-term working capital. We don’t want people who are looking to stretch it out.”
St. Germain’s case was unique because he had just taken over the assets of a failing business and had invested a good deal of money into renovations before he was grounded.
“I had started doing all these renovations with the idea that income would be coming in,” said St. Germain, who also operates a flight school which, like most flight schools, has drawn the recent attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“The FBI has been in here quite a bit,” he said. “They’re mainly concerned with previous students.”
He said he has not reported any suspicious persons who have taken lessons from him, or flown any one of his three planes, but he insisted he would be proactive about security from now on.
The restrictions imposed upon small commercial crafts such as St. Germain’s include not allowing the aircraft to fly in Class B areas, which are mostly metropolitan locations.
“They also can’t fly over large groups of people like a sporting event,” said the FAA spokesperson for the New England Region, Arlene Salac. “And if they’re flying from Point A to Point B they can fly over a reservoir, but they cannot circle it.”
St. Germain said it was difficult to figure out when he could fly again in the days after the attack.
“All of these decisions come out of Washington, D.C., and who do you call there?” he said. “Everyone you do call is waiting on an answer from someone else.”
He said the conditions were also so vague that he has been nervous to fly, because repercussions could vary from military interception to heavy fines from the FAA to bad publicity.
“A pilot should know exactly where he should and shouldn’t fly before he leaves the ground,” he said.
St. Germain said the loan was a real shot in the arm after such a blow to his business.
“It’s a big relief,” he said. “At least I know I can pay the bills for a couple of months.”
With his traffic reporting business St. Germain flies out of T.F. Green twice a day for two hours at a time, and reports to one central location at Metro Media, where the traffic report is distributed to various stations.
