Chinese firm to purchase Mattituck aircraft engine company

Pending approval by the Chinese and American governments, Teledyne Mattituck Services, an aircraft engine overall and repair company located at the Mattituck Airbase, will be acquired by a Chinese firm as part of a $186 million cash deal expected to close early next year.

Technify Motors, a subsidiary of Beijing-Based AVIC International, is to purchase both Teledyne Continental Motors and Mattituck Services. Continental Motors manufactures piston engines for small, non-military aircraft. The Mobile, Ala. company operates service facilities in Mattituck and Fairhope, Ala.

In announcing the sale, Teledyne Technologies, the parent company for both Continental Motors and Mattituck Services. said the agreement calls for maintaining Continental’s Mobile, Ala. manufacturing facility. But Teledyne made no mention of the fate of the Mattituck operation, which enjoys a national reputation for the quality of its engine work.
Calls to Mattituck Services were directed to Teledyne Technologies, which did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

The company that became Mattituck Services started in 1946 when Parker Wickham of Mattituck, who had overhauled airplane engines in World War II, converted part of his family’s New Suffolk Ave. potato farm into a small airport and an aviation engine rebuilding shop.

The Wickhams sold the engine business in 1984, but bought it back four years later. The Teledyne firm acquired it in 1999.

In a 2005 Suffolk Times profile on Mattituck Service,s a sales manager for a Ronkonkoma aircraft rental and flight school described Mattituck’s workmanship as “one of the best in the country, if not the world.”

At that time the business was repairing about 500 engines a year, half as many as 20 years prior. The firm’s workforce had dropped about a third to 45 people.