On June 26th Pipistrel Italia started building the second half of production hall in Gorizia, Italy.

The estimated value of the investment is 4M EUR, which will be mostly covered by Pipistrel alone. The Intesa San Paolo bank approved a loan of 500,000 euros to Pipistrel while the Italian Chamber of Commerce promised us a grant of 310,000 EUR as a part of the "Fondo Gorizia" project. If everything goes as planned without any delays, the official opening of the production facility will be at the end of the next year.

The construction of the facility in two phases was always the plan, from the very beginning. The completion of the first part of the building was planned a full year earlier than it actually happened - it was delayed because the site needed to be rid of unexpolded wartime devices from WW1 and almost one thousand tons of asbestos remains from previous constructions: http://www.pipistrel.si/news/big-bang-at-the-site-of-pipistrels-new-factory-in-italy. The beginning of construction of the second part of the facility has been always planned for 2018.

The second part of the facility is intended mainly to increase the capacity of existing programs and to prepare components for airplanes. At the moment the structure of Pipistrel's production determines that no model is fully produced in Italy from start to finish, but rather assembled in Ajdovščina and then transported to Italy for final assembly and flight testing. Between 15 and 20 aircraft are dispatched from Italy each month. After the opening of the new building, this number is unlikely to increase significantly, because we are planning to change the structure and mainly increase the production of the 4-seat Panthera, which is a much more sophisticated aircraft and takes a longer time to build.

By the end of this year, we plan on having 50 employees in the new facility. This number should almost double by the end of the second year and once the new part is fully functional, we will reach the 200 new jobs as planned.