SKYhigh Dominicana Plans Caribbean’s Largest Airline Hangar

SKYhigh Dominicana Is Building the Largest Hangar at Santo Domingo's Airport, and One of the Largest in the Caribbean

SKYhigh Dominicana has begun construction of a dedicated MRO hangar at Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, a facility large enough to accommodate two aircraft simultaneously that will become the largest hangar at AILA and among the largest in the Caribbean upon completion. The project runs alongside a separately established SKYhigh Dominicana Aeronautical Training Centre covering pilots, cabin crew, technicians and other aviation personnel.

A seven-aircraft regional carrier building one of the Caribbean's largest maintenance facilities is a statement about where SKYhigh sees itself in five years, not where it is today.

The Problem Every Caribbean Airline Shares

The Caribbean's geography is its aviation appeal and its maintenance nightmare simultaneously. Nineteen island destinations spread across hundreds of miles of open water means short-haul flights operating across multiple jurisdictions, frequent cycles of landing and takeoff that accelerate airframe wear, and salt air corrosion that demands more intensive maintenance intervals than continental operations of comparable fleet size. The region's MRO infrastructure has historically not kept pace with those demands.

SKYhigh's executive vice president Cesarina Beauchanps framed the construction precisely: "The growth of an airline is also built from its infrastructure. As we expand our fleet and network, we must strengthen the technical capabilities that sustain every operation." That is not corporate language. it is an operational diagnosis. An airline expanding into new Caribbean and Latin American markets cannot afford to ferry aircraft to Miami or Bogotá for every scheduled maintenance event. The downtime, positioning costs and scheduling disruption compound quickly across a small fleet where every aircraft represents a meaningful share of capacity.

Why Santo Domingo Specifically

Las Américas International Airport is the Dominican Republic's largest and most internationally connected airport, handling close to ten million passengers annually and sitting at the geographic centre of the Caribbean aviation market. SKYhigh already bases its seven-aircraft fleet there and operates 19 destinations from the hub. Building the MRO facility at AILA rather than a secondary airport is a deliberate positioning decision, the airline is signalling that Santo Domingo is its permanent operational base, not a temporary headquarters that might shift as the network grows.

The hangar's two-aircraft capacity means SKYhigh can simultaneously maintain or inspect aircraft while keeping the rest of the fleet operational, a baseline resilience that single-bay facilities cannot provide. For an airline operating time-sensitive Caribbean routes where a grounded aircraft has limited substitution options, that redundancy is worth significant capital investment.

The Training Centre That Changes the Talent Equation

The Aeronautical Training Centre running alongside the hangar project is the less visible but equally important piece of the infrastructure build. Caribbean airlines have historically struggled with technical talent retention, trained engineers and pilots migrate toward larger airlines in Miami, Bogotá and Panama City where compensation and career pathways are more developed. An in-house training facility creates a pipeline of certified technical personnel with institutional loyalty to SKYhigh rather than a transferable credential built on a competitor's training budget.

Together the hangar and the training centre form an integrated infrastructure strategy, build the facility that can maintain the fleet, build the school that trains the people to do it, and reduce the dependency on external providers that has historically constrained how fast Caribbean carriers can grow. SKYhigh is not just building a hangar. It is building the foundation for an airline two or three times its current size.