
NEW DELHI—IndiGo has signed a memorandum of understanding with Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport to build a new maintenance hangar at the airport as the fast-growing Indian carrier seeks to ramp up its in-house maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) operations markedly.
The new facility at Kempegowda will handle IndiGo’s Airbus A320 and A350-900 fleets. The carrier already has two MRO hangars, one at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport and one at Bengaluru, but it has much work to do to become self-sufficient in MRO.
“What we do here, and I saw it when I joined, with the number of engine changes we do, the in-house work we do and the pool of talent we have, it is providing a great opportunity for India and for us to start building it [maintenance capability],” IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers told Aviation Week on the sidelines of the carrier’s media briefing here.
The timeline for IndiGo to achieve more advanced levels of in-house MRO capability has not yet been specified, but the Bengaluru deal is a big step in that direction. “By 2030, we will have 600 aircraft, so it makes a lot of sense,” Elbers said.
“A few years ago, we did very little. Now at the new Bengaluru hangar, which we opened two years back, the amount of work we do is just phenomenal," he noted.
“What we have done over the last two years is enhancing today’s capability,” Elbers added. “What we do going forward is developing new capabilities.”
In addition to expanding the physical infrastructure, IndiGo is recruiting specialists to help the local team develop its MRO operations, as “we need to find a couple of people to help us to start building it,” Elbers noted.
IndiGo recently announced the appointment of Ton Dortmans to support the technical service entry of the airline’s A350 and to support building up IndiGo’s overall MRO strategy for C check capabilities. He is a 40-year veteran of KLM and served for the last 13 years as executive vice president of KLM Engineering & Maintenance.
“If you look to the aviation ecosystem in India, compared to where Indian aviation is going, a lot of that work on the MRO side was being done basically outside India,” Elbers said. “I think the opportunity in India itself, with the young, highly skilled and ambitious population and limited facilities when it comes to MRO—the opportunity really is out there to start building it.”