Known for its motto “Service with no ceiling,” TAC Air is a division of Truman Arnold Companies (TAC), which was founded in 1964 by oil-and-gas entrepreneur Truman Arnold. The TAC Air subsidiary came about later in 1986 as a classic example of turning a problem into an opportunity.
Arnold had been spending so much money on fuel for his planes, he decided to buy out the fueling operation at his local Texarkana airport and named it TAC Air. Before long, he began turning a profit refueling planes outside his own fleet and by the 1990s, TAC Air was bringing in four times the revenue of the overall company. Other divisions of TAC include TAC Energy, TAC Private Hangars and TAC Investments.
Seeing a window of opportunity, Arnold continued to branch out in aviation services, buying fixed-based operations (FBOs) at airports across the country. Today, TAC is led by Truman Arnold’s son Greg Arnold, who is the president and CEO of the company. With more than $3 billion in annual sales, TAC is one of the largest fuel wholesalers and aviation service providers in the country. It operates FBO services at 16 airports nationwide, including locations in Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, Connecticut, New York, Kentucky, Nebraska, Utah, North Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee.
A significant portion of TAC Air’s business comes from Arkansas, where it has three FBO centers and one private hangar. The company provides ground services for non-commercial planes at the Clinton National Airport in Little Rock as well as Texarkana Regional Airport and Fort Smith Regional Airport. Interestingly, the Fort Smith location is one to keep an eye on as a source for growth potential.
TAC Air operates 16 FBOs across the country. (Courtesy of TAC Air)
While TAC Air provides services for Fort Smith, this also includes servicing Ebbing Air National Guard Base, the airfield adjacent to the Fort Smith airport which also shares its runways. TAC Vice President of Marketing Tad Perryman noted, “The military base has always been an important part of the business there, and with the new contract coming in with Singapore military, that’s actually a very big piece for us as well.”
The Singapore Air Force squadron will be making Fort Smith its new home. Last year, Ebbing was selected to be the long-term pilot training center supporting F-16 and F-35 fighter planes purchased by Singapore, Switzerland and other countries participating in the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program. The plan is for the military base to house 36 F-35 planes and one F-16 squadron from the Republic of Singapore. “You’ve got Little Rock, which really has a lot of business for the state,” Perryman explained. “But Fort Smith is very well-positioned from an aviation standpoint. Arkansas is an especially strong aeronautics and aviation state and is doing a lot in the air defense area.”
Closing in on almost 60 years of business in the aviation industry, TAC must be doing something right. Perryman attributes the company’s success to its “level of service,” citing that although excellent service is something many will claim, his company actively focuses on training and building the skill level of its employees.
“It’s about a lot of training, a lot of management and understanding,” he said.
The company has a long list of employees who were hired at a young age with no previous experience in aviation services but were trained, gained experience and ended up staying until the age of retirement. At TAC, 25- and 35-year work anniversaries are common.
According to Perryman, people stay at TAC because the company culture is so strong. “We really are a family-focused company, and we care about the people who work for us,” he said. He also noted that the company teaches people to have a good balance between work and life, and that the idea of “work hard and have a little fun” is a mantra handed down from Arnold himself.
Customer service continues to be an actionable part of the business for TAC. The company recently invested in developing a tool it has named the Focus App, which will strengthen communication between TAC Air and its customers. The Focus App is a handheld device that looks like a phone (but is not actually a phone) and is given to the pilot. Once a plane lands, the pilot can order whatever services are needed directly from the device. This can include ordering specific amounts of fuel, reserving hangar space or requesting lavatory service.
In the past, these requests were written down on a small pad by a TAC Air employee. Now, it’s all put in electronically and communicated into the system. The modernized method lessens the chance of miscommunication. Imagine that a pilot is ordering fuel and says, “I want a thousand gallons,” but the worker heard, “I want 10 thousand gallons.”
The Focus App is connected via Wi-Fi directly from the device in the pilot’s hand to the computer inside the office. Before payments are processed, everything is itemized on the screen, and the pilot signs off on the app. “From an innovation standpoint, it reduces issues, makes it easier and quicker for us to do our job and allows us to provide a better service for our customers,” Perryman explained. “It also allows us to be much more efficient and precise on the back end with our billing.”
The Focus App is currently in a testing phase across the entire system of FBOs and has been getting positive feedback from pilots and customers. The company plans to follow up with an actual app that customers will be able to download onto their phones. This will allow orders to be made before the plane lands, so that when the wheels touch down, TAC Air is already prepared to jump in with requested services. The faster service will especially make an impact on smaller aircraft, which need to land more frequently to refuel over the course of a long flight.
Like most industries, the aviation service industry is constantly changing. Arkansas airports continue to provide centralized locations for airplanes to refuel and continue. At the same time, the state is growing its business offerings and becoming more of a destination, which means more executive jets are requesting hangars and other overnight services.
The Fort Smith airport is regularly used by executives visiting Bentonville. “It’s very different between each FBO, even within the state,” Perryman said. “The atmosphere has changed in regard to who’s flying and how they fly. There’s been a lot of change over the years. Fortunately, it has been a great market that started small but has been able to grow and maintain itself because of its location.”
