“I have done a little bit of everything,” said Ozzie Saez, the owner of Aero Salvage Design. “I have owned 18 businesses. This one started because I used to build aluminum cars—re-creation cars. Then we built somebody a piece of furniture out of a section of one of those cars. That led to ‘Hey, can you build me this?’”
Now, Aero Salvage Design uses aircraft components to make things like Industrial-Modern design chairs, conference tables, coffee tables, and campers. “At one point, I was buying so many pieces of aircraft, I said to a seller, ‘Hey, how much is it to buy a whole aircraft?’” Saez said. “I was thinking it is going to be an astronomical price—and it’s not cheap. But he gave me a price and I said, ‘I will buy the plane. I could have already owned one.’ And then it went from one plane to two.”
“I have 3,000 seats, and that used to be 80 to 90 percent of our business,” Saez said. “Now it is 80 to 90 percent building creative spaces. The first big project was the Sky Coffee aircraft in Miami. We have built several since, but Sky Coffee is the most impressive because it is 45 feet, and it is right smack dab in downtown Miami. We do everything here. We cut the aircraft, and we do all of the finished work.”
“Not too long ago, somebody asked me, ‘Why Plant City?” Saez said. “I said ‘Why not? This is the closest place for reasonable money for the space—that is why Plant City.”
The company has 24 commercial passenger aircraft in its inventory, and many smaller planes including a G-4, a Global business jet, and what is left of Jeffrey Epstein’s G-4. “From time to time, we go pick up aircraft from popular and not-so-popular people,” Saez said. “We got the Epstein aircraft, initially, because I work with a lot of art projects. The goal was to cut it up into sections, and to have the counter—the opposite side of what he was so infamous for, to make an anti-human trafficking art project to auction to benefit the cause. But, it was tricky for a lot of reasons. Because it was his plane, it was going to bring a lot of questions, so instead, I have sold off some pieces for similar causes, but the rest of it was scrapped.”
“At any given time, I may have six, seven projects,” Saez said. Three of his current projects are building jet interior props for movie studios. Another is a DC 3 that will be used as a DJ float with a VIP lounge for Burning Man, an annual music and arts festival near Las Vegas. Saez recently moved a 747 to Houston that will become an aircraft themed, short-term rental. One of his other recent builds is being turned into a cafeteria.
“We just provided an MD 94 for Ariana Grande’s perfume line,” Saez added. “That is down in Miami. “We didn’t finish it, but we did the cuts and all of the custom things. They finished out the interior. I provided the seats, which we had to paint pink.”
Saez just returned from six weeks of working on one of his projects—building an airplane glamping destination in Alaska’s Kenai peninsula. “It is the fishing capital of Alaska, and I would daresay the world,” he commented. “This will be a summer thing.” The camp is called Aero Pods Alaska, and will rent out 12 cabins made from aircraft. “We went up there to prep the main lodge and the land for the first six pods.” Saez plans to build 15 such glampgrounds around the country in a move to build a profit-sharing business.
What does Saez enjoy about his work? “The creative process,” he said. “All of my businesses have been the artsy-fartsy type. So, anything that involves making something out of nothing. In this case, it involves scrap.” And, “The finished product….the satisfaction of seeing your ideas come to life—as corny as that may sound—when you see your whatever-it-is in the news. A lot of this stuff is something I start as a two in the morning type of idea. The thing is, a lot of people have ideas, but they just drag their feet. I am either all in or all out. Sometimes they fail—because that happens. But when they hit, they hit super-hard. And everybody pats you on the back, and there is a certain gratification that comes from that. I probably could be making more money if I was doing something else, but this is fun.”