DEVELOPING A SUSTAINABLE DOMESTIC MRO ECOSYSTEM

India is expanding its civil aviation MRO infrastructure, but without deeper component repair capability, regulatory alignment and supply-chain control, it risks creating capacity without sovereignty and continued reliance on foreign maintenance ecosystems

- By SWAATI KETKAR

INDIA IS ENTERING WHAT APPEARS TO BE ITS LONG-AWAITED engine MRO moment. With Safran establishing its flagship LEAP and CFM56 engine overhaul facility in Hyderabad, expanding airframe maintenance capacity across multiple airports, and a rapidly growing fleet pipeline driven by IndiGo, Air India and Akasa, the country appears to be on the cusp of a maintenance renaissance. Yet behind this optimism lies a more uncomfortable truth, India is not yet building a sovereign aircraft maintenance ecosystem. It is building infrastructure. It does not yet have control.

In global aviation, dominance is no longer defined by who manufactures aircraft, but by who controls maintenance pipelines, spares access, certification authority, manpower supply chains, turnaround reliability and Power-by-the-Hour (PBH) economics. These invisible levers decide fleet availability, airline profitability, military readiness and even national mobility resilience. And today, India controls very few of them.

COMPONENT MRO

A sustainable MRO hub is not defined by airframe hangars or engine test cells alone but it is defined by component repair density. India today has limited depth in high-value component categories such as fuel systems, pneumatics, actuation, avionics LRUs, landing gear accessories and environmental control systems.

This creates the condition of a 'missing middle' in the maintenance value chain. Aircraft may be checked in India, engines may be overhauled in India, but a large share of components still fly abroad.