Aviation services provider MENA Aerospace is switching strategy after 13 years to focus on providing outsourced maintenance, repair and overhaul to other MROs from its hangar at Bahrain airport.
After investing in a private jet hangar and abandoning a business aircraft MRO venture, founder and managing director Mohammed Juman says MENA, established in 2005, will now concentrate on sub-contracting for other repair houses.
It will use its hangar – which can accommodate two narrowbody aircraft – and its own employee technicians and specialists brought in from partner companies, including US-based Aircraft Recovery Modification International (ARMI), with which MENA signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” at the Bahrain air show on 14 November.
ARMI specialises in avionics and in-flight entertainment and communications upgrades, as well as passenger-to-freighter conversions and installing winglets. Managing partner Morgan Gillette says the California-based company operates a largely “mobile business”, hiring out qualified technicians to work in customers’ premises.
MENA’s new service – dubbed Aviation Maintenance and Support Solutions – will offer a “one-stop shop” to MROs that are short of capacity or want to offer support closer to their customer. “The key is that we are not competing with MROs for their customers, but instead offering them a plug-in service,” says Juman.
The move also makes sense, he says, because the Bahrain government provides funding to train its own nationals to become aircraft technicians.
Juman is also keen to tie up with real estate investors to fund hangars in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and possibly Pakistan, to extend the business to these countries.
MENA will continue to partner Austrian firm International Jet Management through its joint venture IJM MENA to manage a small fleet of Bahrain-registered private jets. IJM MENA recently added its fifth aircraft, a Bombardier Challenger 604.
Source: Flight International
