Aftermarket parts distributor Seattle Aviation Solutions is considering adding a new warehouse in Asia-Pacific by mid-2026 as it looks to capitalize on growth in the region.
Seattle Aviation Solutions (SAS) started operating in 2017 focusing on both commercial and business aviation segments, which it now services through a 50-50 split. On the commercial side, the company works with manufacturers such as Boeing, Airbus and Embraer while holding a heavier focus toward Bombardier product for the business aviation segment. In recent years, it has also started tearing down Boeing 777 and 737 aircraft to further ramp up its commercial aviation output.
Mustafa Altork, the company’s CEO, says it now holds around $40 million worth of inventory at two warehouses. Its main base is in Seattle. In 2019, it started operating a warehouse in Dubai, close to Al Maktoum International Airport, where it started locating inventories to service regional customers.
“We work with several OEMs and as a distributor for several parts companies and we're looking to build a whole new idea of e-commerce particularly for commercial aviation,” Altork says.
In the eight years since SAS started operating, Altork says the part supply side of the business has grown substantially. “We've seen double digit growth every year,” he says. “Now it's kind of getting more stable, and the growth is being balanced by the ongoing global supply chain issues.”
Altork says SAS is looking to continue its global expansion beyond its U.S. headquarters. He says the next likely destination for the company is Asia-Pacific given the region’s growth trajectory.
“Based on the data we've been mining so far to see if it makes financial sense, I can see our next warehouse being somewhere in Asia as that market has grown tremendously in the past two years,” he says. While no location is fixed yet, Altork says he can see it being somewhere like Singapore, which has an established aviation ecosystem and is easily accessible from a logistics perspective.
However, he concedes the supply of tooling has presented challenges to the industry. In 2022,, SAS acquired Four Star Accessory Overhaul, a hydraulic and pneumatic repair shop close to its Seattle main base. Predominantly working on Lockheed Martin C-130 military aircraft, SAS has looked to diversify the business’s capabilities to begin working on commercial and business aircraft repairs, but Altork says a hangover from the pandemic period still lingers.
“We face a lot of challenges getting tools and test equipment in a timely manner," he says. "It takes a long time to get any of these tools to the facility due to what happened in the pandemic.”
Altork says SAS built resilience to the current global supply chain issues by investing more than $3 million into the IT side of its operation during the pandemic years. “Instead of building physical warehouses, we built data warehouses where we started analyzing every bit of data available, doing predictions for the market including which parts to keep for our customers,” he says.
Altork says SAS has also invested into its enterprise resource planning system, aimed at better operational functionality and an e-commerce platform for customers.
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