A Mansfield-based company recently acquired by a Fort Worth holding company is reaping the benefits of the new U.S.-European Union agreement streamlining aircraft repair certifications as well as rising industry demand.
Evans Composites has seen transformative growth this past year with revenue in June 2025 increasing by 55% compared to June 2024, and its workforce doubling in size to 106.
What pleases Nick McDonald, vice president and general manager of Evans, is that the business is coming from all the major sectors of the company’s business.
“It’s pretty balanced,” he said. “We have our airlines — American, United and so forth — and we have our defense division, and we also have our brokers. The nice thing is, it is coming from all of them equally. If you look at our top three customers at the moment, one’s a broker, one’s an airline and one’s in defense.”
Founded in 2001, Evans Composites is a certified repair station, specializing in the repair and overhaul of sheet metal, metal bonded and composite structures for corporate, commercial and military aircraft.
Despite the increase in business and uptick in employees, McDonald said he is sleeping better at night than he was a year ago when they were half as busy.
“The difference now is that we have our processes in place, not everywhere, but enough, so we’re much better positioned to handle the work,” he said. “Last year at this time, I was losing sleep. Now, I’m sleeping a lot better.”
The company’s customers are apparently sleeping better too, he said.
“We give them an update every step of the way now, and if something happens to change their timeline, they get a message on that too,” he said.
Those processes were put in place when Evans Composites became a part of Coltala Aerospace earlier in 2025.
Coltala Aerospace is a division of Fort Worth-based Coltala Holdings, which has previously made investments ranging from health care to real estate to construction before moving into aerospace earlier this year.
To make its entrance into aerospace, Coltala Holdings in February acquired a majority stake in holding company Mansfield-based Aeroparts Group, which had three companies under its wing and was rebranded Coltala Aerospace. Coltala Aerospace’s portfolio now consists of:
- Aircraft Certificate Design and Consulting, an aircraft repair consulting firm.
- AeroParts Machining, a manufacturer of specialty aircraft parts as well as a repair shop.
- Evans Composites, a structure repair shop that focuses on cowlings, inlets, wings, wing flaps, control surfaces and other areas.
“Evans Composites represents the kind of high-integrity business Coltala seeks to elevate — one with deep industry roots and the capacity for transformation,” said Ralph Manning, co-founder of Coltala Holdings in a statement. “The team’s rapid progress is due to operational excellence and their culture of continuous improvement and accountability.
Under the Coltala Aerospace platform, the company has been able to maximize its capabilities, said Rick Armstrong, CEO of Coltala Aerospace.
“By combining deep technical capability with Coltala’s disciplined operational model, we are now stronger, faster, and more strategically aligned to serve our partners in aerospace and defense,” he said.
The process changes have resulted in over 30% reduction in turn times, improvements in cross-functional collaboration, more data-driven decision making, enhanced customer experience and scalable infrastructure investment.
“We still have more to go,” said McDonald, “but with the addition of new tablets on the shop floor and redesigning employee work spaces, we have achieved the operational capacity to make our current phase of growth not only possible but sustainable for the long term.”
The company has also become more rigorous in their hiring processes, McDonald said. That has allowed the company to know the new employees are capable of doing what is needed when they come on board.
Evans Composites and other companies in the aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul business in North America look to have quite a bit of runway ahead in their market. Verified Market Research expects the maintenance, repair and overhaul business in North America to reach $28.6 billion by 2031, up from $21.6 billion in 2023.
Coltala Aerospace officials attributed much of that growth to the trade agreement with the European Union; the tariff issues that are pushing companies to look at repair instead of buying overseas parts; and increasing air passenger traffic in a strong economy.
Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org.
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