Kansas Grows as a Hub for Aircraft Maintenance and Overhaul
Beyond building aircraft, Kansas is expanding its role in the lucrative business of maintaining, repairing, and overhauling them.
Kansas is expanding its role in the lucrative business of maintaining, repairing, and overhauling aircraft, adding to an aviation economy long anchored by manufacturing.
The maintenance, repair, and overhaul sector, known as MRO, keeps the world's aircraft flying safely and represents a steady source of skilled jobs less prone to the boom-and-bust cycles of new aircraft production. Kansas facilities service everything from business jets to commercial airliners.
"Airplanes always need maintenance, in good times and bad, and that makes MRO a stabilizer," an industry official said. The work demands highly trained technicians certified to exacting standards.
Officials see MRO growth as a way to diversify the state's aviation economy, capturing value across an aircraft's decades-long life, not just at the moment it is built.
