Mohammad Mayata, Royal Jordanian head of engineering and maintenance, and Fraser Currie, Joramco’s CEO, sign an E2 agreement at MRO Middle East 2025.
DUBAI—Joramco expects to open a new hangar at the end of this quarter that can accommodate five lines of narrowbody maintenance or a combination of narrowbody and widebody aircraft as large as the Airbus A380.
After the opening, Joramco, based in Amman, Jordan, will have 22 lines of parallel maintenance, making it one of the largest independent MRO shops in the Middle East.
The new Hangar 7 is part of a $100 million investment in three hangars. Its twin, Hangar 8, is currently scheduled to be built in 2026. Hangar 9, scheduled for 2028, will be a paint hangar that simultaneously can house one widebody and one narrowbody or two narrowbodies. Given the MRO capacity challenges around the world, the 2026 and 2028 timeframes “could easily accelerate into a back-to-back contract” for the buildings, says Joramco CEO Fraser Currie.
Joramco’s maintenance lines are booked through 2025, with the exception of a few slots this summer reserved for its customers’ lease returns, says Currie. “We’re pretty much sold out in the high seasons of 2026,” so he urges operators to plan maintenance as far ahead as possible, especially for widebodies.
“We’re seeing a huge demand for widebodies. There are just no widebody slots out there,” he says, adding that Joramco is booked for two years and is seeing mostly Boeing 787 and 777s, although “the older A340s are still hanging in there.”
The Jordanian MRO also is seeing older narrowbodies in its shops—aircraft “we weren’t expecting to see again,” but OEM delivery delays have forced airlines to extend their service lives. This is driving cabin refurbishments.
Cabin connectivity is part of this, and Joramco is in the process of becoming an approved installation center for SpaceX's Starlink system. Currie expects this to happen by April.
By the end of the first quarter, Joramco also expects to take its maintenance operation paperless with EmpowerMX, the system it implemented in 2020. Technicians will use Apple iPads instead of paper task cards.
“We have been doing beta testing and rolling out dual testing, where we’ve running paper and paperless in parallel,” says Currie. The system includes gates, so if a task does not have an electronic stamp on it, technicians cannot move to the next task. “It’s having a real impact on eliminating errors withing the task cards,” he says.
While the MRO industry is still largely paper based today, “I think if you look back in five years, anyone who is still using paper will have to have a real look at themselves,” suggests Currie.
During Aviation Week Network’s MRO Middle East, Jordan signed a contract with Royal Jordanian to perform maintenance checks on the airline’s new Embraer 195-E2 aircraft. This will be the first time that the MRO will service this model.
Joramco became a Dubai Aerospace Enterprise company in 2016.
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