Aegean Group Turns Greece Into an MRO Hub

Aegean Group Is Building Greece Into a Regional MRO Hub, Three Projects, One Strategy, and F-16s in the Mix

Aegean Group is simultaneously running three interlocking MRO investments designed to make Greece a self-sufficient aviation maintenance hub for the first time in its history.

Olympic Air, the Aegean Airlines subsidiary, has adjusted the budget for its planned technical training centre while maintaining the project as part of a broader infrastructure build. The budget revision is a footnote in a strategy that is more ambitious than it appears, the Aegean Group is simultaneously running three interlocking MRO investments designed to make Greece a self-sufficient aviation maintenance hub for the first time in its history.

An airline group that operates 75 aircraft decided it also wants to maintain F-16s. That tells you something about the scale of what is being built.

Three Projects Running at Once

The first layer opened in early 2024, a new Aircraft Maintenance and Crew Training Centre at Athens International Airport providing EASA-approved heavy maintenance and engineer training for Aegean Group's own fleet. The second layer arrived in February 2026 when Olympic Air acquired a 45% stake in Athens-based MRO firm APELLA for a combination of share purchases and capital injection. APELLA will develop a new maintenance facility in Almyros, 300 kilometres northwest of Athens, on a 100,000-square-metre site near Nea Anchialos Airport. The third layer is the technical training centre whose budget has just been adjusted, a standalone educational infrastructure component that feeds qualified engineers into the maintenance facilities being built around it.

Each project addresses a different bottleneck. The Athens training centre solves the immediate fleet maintenance gap. The APELLA Almyros facility creates heavy maintenance capacity that Greece has never had at scale. The training centre pipeline solves the workforce problem that would otherwise prevent both from operating at capacity.

Aegean Group MRO Strategy Brings Multiple Projects Together

The Aegean Group MRO strategy connects its own fleet requirements with broader commercial and defence maintenance opportunities. The aim is not simply to maintain Aegean aircraft, but to develop a wider MRO ecosystem capable of supporting external customers as well.

The APELLA Dimension That Makes This Unusual

APELLA generated EUR 15 million in turnover and EUR 1.3 million net profit in 2024, employs 151 specialists, and is a certified EASA Part 145 organisation. It is already a profitable business, not a turnaround project or a greenfield investment. What Olympic Air bought is an established MRO operation with an existing customer base that includes Aegean, Olympic Air MRO and Sky Express domestically, plus a defence sector position that goes well beyond commercial aviation.

APELLA is an approved vendor for Lockheed Martin, playing a pivotal role in the F-16 maintenance and modernisation efforts for the Hellenic Air Force, including the transition to the advanced F-16 Viper variant. That defence contract sits alongside the commercial MRO work and gives the Almyros facility a revenue diversity that pure commercial MRO operations cannot match. Military contracts are longer-term, less price-sensitive and less cyclically volatile than commercial aviation maintenance — the kind of anchor customer that justifies major infrastructure investment before the commercial throughput fully materialises.

Why Greece Specifically

Greece's geography is the foundational argument. Positioned at the intersection of European and Middle Eastern aviation corridors, with major tourist traffic generating aircraft cycles at Greek airports and a long history of technical aviation expertise through the Hellenic Aerospace Industry, the country has always had the inputs for a regional Greece MRO hub. What it has lacked is the investment to assemble them into a coherent industrial offering.

Greece's strategic location, growing traffic volumes and competitive operating costs have boosted its appeal as a regional hub for aircraft maintenance services. Athens International Airport handled nearly 30 million passengers in 2025, a record, generating aircraft maintenance demand that currently leaves Greece to be met by facilities in Malta, Cyprus, Turkey and further afield. Every C-check or heavy maintenance event that currently sends an aircraft to a foreign facility is potential revenue that stays outside Greece. The Aegean Group is building the infrastructure to capture a share of it domestically.

APELLA MRO Gives the Strategy an Existing Operating Base

APELLA MRO brings an established certified operation, existing specialists and commercial and defence customers into the wider Aegean strategy. That gives the group an operating base while the new Almyros infrastructure is developed.

The Training Gap That Determines Everything

The budget adjustment on the technical training centre is the most operationally significant element of this week's news, even if it reads as the least dramatic. Aircraft maintenance engineers require years of training and EASA certification, they cannot be recruited from other industries or trained quickly when demand spikes. The Almyros facility plans to expand through phases, aircraft parking and dismantling first, then paint shops and heavy maintenance check facilities. Each phase requires qualified engineers to staff it. The training centre is the pipeline that makes the timeline for those phases achievable rather than aspirational.

Aegean Group CEO Dimitris Gerogiannis described the strategy precisely: "Our objective is to gradually build a broad ecosystem of complementary know-how, operational expertise and development skills." The training centre, the APELLA stake and the Athens facility are the three corners of that ecosystem. The budget adjustment on one corner does not change the shape of what is being built.

Greece is not yet a regional MRO hub. The Aegean Group Olympic Air strategy is building one from the inside out, using its own fleet maintenance needs as the anchor demand and APELLA's defence contracts as the financial stability that allows it to invest across a multi-year timeline. The F-16s are flying today. The Almyros hangars are coming.