Seventy-three years, told straight.

A metal-finishing shop opens in Tulsa.

Willard A. Emery founds Southwest Metal Finishing Co., later Southwest United Industries, serving the aircraft plants and repair stations of a city that called itself the oil capital and was quietly becoming an aerospace town. Plating, anodizing, grinding: the unglamorous processes that every flight-critical part passes through. He builds the company with his son, Willard S. Emery.

The first hard chrome on aluminum in the Midwest.

Southwest earns its first aerospace process approvals for chemical film, anodizing and painting, and installs its first hard chrome plating tank, becoming the first processor in the Midwest to apply hard chrome plating to aluminum. Five years in, the shop has chosen its industry.

Structural components, and the largest anodizing tank in the Midwest.

Southwest processes structural components for Douglas, Boeing, McDonnell, Bell Helicopter and North American Rockwell. New buildings go up; new tanks go in, including the largest chromic acid anodizing tank in the Midwest. In the 1970s thermal spray and precision grinding widen the company again, into refurbishing hydraulic engine components for Caterpillar and into medical and transportation work.

Work on the Space Shuttle program.

SWU's finishing processes reach NASA's Shuttle program: the kind of qualification work that turns a job shop into an institution. In 1985 the family founds Southwest Aeroservice as a sister company, expanding thermal spray and concentrating on aircraft component repair.

Replacing chrome plating, with Boeing and Lufthansa watching.

Working alongside Boeing and Lufthansa, SWU helps develop, test, and put into service HVOF thermal spray as a replacement for hard chrome plating, an environmental and engineering problem the whole industry was circling. The third generation, Bill and Jim Emery, lead the company through it, meeting ever-rising environmental and quality standards and expanding by acquisition and greenfield construction. In 1999 Southwest makes its first out-of-state acquisition, Plasma Coating Corporation of Gardena, California, to serve customers on the West Coast. Jim Emery runs it.

First in North America on the A380.

In its fiftieth year, Southwest becomes the first and only facility in North America approved to apply HVOF coating to landing gear parts for the Airbus A380. The same capability carries the company onto the C-17, the F/A-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter.

Southwest becomes an international company.

Southwest buys CEEL Limited in Brampton, Ontario in 2006 and Advanced Processing Inc. in Concord in 2008, combining them at the end of 2009 as Southwest United Canada, a single Nadcap-accredited source serving Bombardier, Bell Helicopter, Boeing, Gulfstream and Héroux-Devtek. The same year, a joint venture with Galnik brings Nadcap aerospace processing to Querétaro, Mexico. In Houston, Lineage Alloys adds HVOF powder manufacturing, sold on a few years later. Jim Emery leads the California and Canadian operations. Closer to home, a satellite plant in Oklahoma City runs anodize tanks among the largest in the region.

Sold to Precision Castparts. BAK is formed.

In the mid-2000s the family partners with Argonaut Private Equity, a Tulsa firm that would work alongside three Emery companies across two generations. In 2012, in its sixtieth year of family ownership, Southwest United is sold to Precision Castparts, a Berkshire Hathaway company. Rather than let six decades of operating knowledge disperse, Bill Emery forms BAK Development, named for the initials of his three children, as the family office that carries it forward.

Back into the shop: Mingo Aerospace.

Mingo Aerospace, an FAA-certificated Tulsa repair station built around cargo loading systems, is acquired and run by the fourth generation. The same year, the family acquires Mingo Manufacturing; five years later it is sold back to its original ownership group.

Seven years of building.

The cargo loading business grows first, and then keeps growing, until Mingo is serving passenger and freight operators across four continents, among them Lufthansa, Japan Airlines, ANA, LATAM, UPS and Atlas Air.

Then we install HVOF at Mingo. It is the same process the family had helped put into service at Southwest United a generation earlier, and the relationships came with it. Within a few years an Oklahoma thermal spray operation built from nothing is repairing 737NG and 777 landing gear components for the major landing gear shops worldwide, and repairing 737NG flap and slat tracks from a second facility in Owasso for some of the largest 737 fleets flying.

On the cargo side we go further upstream, developing FAA PMA parts and DER repairs that solved OEM supply chain problems for operators around the world. Starting in 2017 with a single engineer, we build one of the larger PMA and DER engineering groups in the MRO industry.

Mingo is acquired by Blue Sea Capital, which combines it with Sunvair to form Sunvair Aerospace Group. We keep equity in the platform and take a board seat.

Sunvair sells to Greenbriar. We step off the board.

After four years helping steer the MRO roll-up, Sunvair Aerospace Group is acquired by Greenbriar Equity Group. We exit fully at close: eleven years, start to finish, in one company's story.

Back on the shop floor.

Cherry Creek Machine, a precision CNC machining company in Tulsa, is acquired, and the cycle begins again: new machinery, new certifications underway, new people. The same year we co-found OK Autonomous, led by Bill Emery, connecting autonomous-systems OEMs with Oklahoma's manufacturing base.