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Air India breaks ground on a nine-acre plane repair hangar at Delhi airport

The new MRO hangar will fit a big and a small jet at once, so Air India can fix more of its planes at home instead of sending work elsewhere.

Pranav Sharma Edock team

22 Oct 2026·7 min read

Version 1 Published 22 Oct 2026, 9:59 pm IST History Public record

Picture a car service centre. Now make it big enough to hold a jumbo jet and a regular passenger plane side by side, with a roof 25 metres high. That is roughly what Air India has started to build at Delhi airport.

On 22 October 2026, Air India announced the groundbreaking of a new maintenance hangar at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport. Groundbreaking means the first dig of the soil, the day building work officially starts. The airline, owned by the Tata Group, says the hangar will help it do more of its own plane repair work at home.

First, what is an MRO?

MRO stands for Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul. Think of the three words like this:

  • Maintenance is the regular check-up, like getting your scooter's oil changed every few months.
  • Repair is fixing something that broke, like a flat tyre or a torn seat.
  • Overhaul is the big one: taking a part apart, cleaning and checking every piece, and putting it back together, almost like new.

Planes need all three, all the time. Safety rules say every aircraft must go through regular inspections and checks before it can keep flying. A plane that is stuck on the ground for repairs earns no money, a bit like an auto rickshaw parked at the mechanic's shop all day.

A hangar is the giant shed where this work happens. It keeps the plane out of the rain and sun, and gives engineers room to climb all over it.

What exactly is Air India building?

Here are the facts the airline shared:

  • The facility is spread across nine acres. One acre is about half the size of a football field.
  • It is designed to hold one widebody and one narrowbody plane at the same time. A widebody is a big plane with two aisles inside, the kind used for long trips abroad. A narrowbody has one aisle and mostly flies shorter routes within India.
  • Air India says it will be the first facility in Delhi able to fit one of each together.
  • The hangar will have a 25-metre clear height, roughly as tall as an eight-storey building, and large spaces with no pillars in the way, so newer and bigger planes can fit.

The groundbreaking was attended by Air India's CEO and Managing Director Tewolde Gebremariam, along with senior people from Air India and Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), the company that runs the airport.

The reports did not share the cost of the project, the date it will be finished, or how many people will work there. So those numbers are not known yet.

Why put everything under one roof?

Imagine your phone breaks. The screen is fixed in one shop, the battery in another, and the charger has to be ordered from a third city. It takes days. Now imagine one shop that has the parts, the experts and the tools in one place. Much faster.

That is the idea here. According to a report on the announcement, the hangar will bring inspections, engineering offices, spare parts storage and cabin repair work into one complex. This cuts the need to move parts and tools between separate places.

Before and after panels: before, checks, parts and cabin fixes happen in separate places; after, a nine acre hangar brings checks, a parts store and a cabin shop together in Delhi
One big change: the work that was spread out comes together in one place.

Air India listed four main gains:

  1. Less time on the ground. With inspections, cabin upkeep and fixing faults in one place, planes should spend less time parked and more time flying.
  2. A spare parts store on site. A warehouse right next to the planes, plus engineering offices, should mean fewer delays waiting for parts and lower costs for moving things around.
  3. A dedicated cabin shop. This is a special workshop for the inside of the plane. It should mean faster repairs and less need to depend on outside companies.
  4. Quicker rescue for stuck planes. When a plane is grounded because of a technical problem, teams and parts close by can get it back in the air sooner.
Four steps: a plane rolls in for its check, spare parts come from the store next door, the cabin shop repairs the insides, and the plane goes back to flying sooner
The plan in four simple steps, as Air India describes it.

Why does Delhi matter so much?

Delhi airport is Air India's largest operational hub. A hub is like a main bus depot: the place where most of a company's vehicles start and end their trips. When the repair shop sits right at the depot, planes do not have to fly somewhere else just to get fixed.

This is not Air India's only such project. The airline group has already started building a much larger MRO facility on a 35-acre plot at Bengaluru airport, with SIA Engineering Company, part of the Singapore Airlines group, as its partner. The Delhi hangar is a smaller, separate project at the airline's largest hub.

Why not just send planes abroad?

For years, a lot of India's plane repair work has happened in other countries. A December 2025 report in Indian Infrastructure said over 80 per cent of MRO work for Indian planes is still carried out overseas.

That is costly. The same report says Indian airlines spend 12 to 15 per cent of their revenue on maintenance. Revenue is all the money that comes in from selling tickets and other services. So for every Rs 100 an airline earns, about Rs 12 to Rs 15 goes into keeping planes in shape. More than half of that maintenance money goes to engine and part repairs, which are mostly done abroad.

Sending a plane to another country for a check is like sending your bike to another city for servicing. You pay for the trip, you wait longer, and the bike earns you nothing while it is away.

A fast-growing repair business

India's fleet is growing fast, so the need for repair work is growing too. The same report says India has over 840 aircraft, and about 2,200 more are expected to join over the next 20 years.

India's MRO market was worth $1.7 billion in 2021, about $2 billion in 2024, and is expected to reach $4 billion by 2031. The number of MRO facilities in India rose from 96 in 2014 to 154 by June 2025.

A big number counting up to 4 billion dollars, with three bars for 2021, 2024 and 2031 rising in height
India's plane repair market is expected to double from 2024 to 2031.

The government has also made it cheaper. GST, the tax added to the bill, on MRO services was cut from 18 per cent to 5 per cent, the report says. Other airlines are building too: IndiGo is setting up an MRO facility of over 31 acres at Bengaluru airport, expected to start by 2028.

See it in action

Here is a short look at one part of MRO work, tyre maintenance, from Air India Express, a sister airline in the Air India group.

Watch on YouTube

What it means for you

For travellers, Air India says better maintenance should mean more reliable flights and a better experience on board. Fewer planes stuck on the ground can mean fewer last-minute delays.

For students thinking about careers, the bigger picture is clear from the numbers above. India is adding hundreds of planes, and each one needs regular care for many years. Every hangar built at home is more of that work happening in India instead of overseas.

Sources

Air India Aviation Business MRO

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