MRO AND SUPPLY CHAIN
Latin American MRO capacity attracts investment as ferry costs bite
Carriers tired of flying airframes to Miami for heavy checks are backing regional shops instead.
Aerospace Garage desk
The economics of Latin American maintenance have been distorted for years by a simple fact: much of the region’s heavy check work flies to the United States. The ferry cost, the days of lost utilisation and the hard-currency exposure have all been tolerated because regional capacity was thin.
That is changing at the margins. AEROMAN in El Salvador and COOPESA in Costa Rica have built genuine narrowbody heavy-check capability, and Brazilian shops have expanded around Embraer support. The constraint is approvals and skilled labour rather than hangar space.
Currency volatility cuts both ways. It makes dollar-denominated overseas maintenance painful, which argues for local capacity, but it also makes financing that capacity harder for operators whose revenue is in local currency.
Our read: watch Part-145 scope filings rather than hangar openings. Capability breadth determines whether the work stays in the region.
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