AAR To Acquire 65% Of MRO Holdings

AAR Corp. announced plans on Sept. 28 to acquire 65% of MRO Holdings for about $1.725 billion. This is AAR’s seventh acquisition in four years.

Acquiring MRO Holdings will grow AAR’s aircraft maintenance footprint from seven facilities to 12, increase its maintenance service hours from 7 million to 19 million, and increase the number of aircraft serviced annually from about 1,200 to 3,000.

MRO Holdings is “bigger than us in heavy maintenance, has a stellar reputation and a blue-chip customer base,” 90% of which is from U.S. airlines, AAR CEO John Holmes tells Aviation Week.

Roberto Kriete, Caoba Capital and Bain will retain 35% ownership. “We’ve got the option to buy out that remaining 35% over the next four years, which we fully intend to do,” says Holmes.

The companies agreed on the 65% stake because it gives AAR the majority stake and control yet also allows it “to preserve AAR’s financial flexibility. We wanted to make sure that we kept our debt at a manageable level and wanted to make sure we had plenty of capital to deploy to the other areas of our business that we wanted to grow,” says Holmes. And none of the owners wanted to sell outright—they are all getting cash and AAR stock—until AAR takes full ownership within four years.

“We have an incredible amount of respect for the business that Roberto Kriete has built,” says Holmes.

AAR expects the deal to generate $75 million of synergies gained from overhead, procurement and best practice efficiencies.

On top of that, “we see tremendous opportunity to cross sell,” says Holmes, particularly for component repair work. Having a larger heavy maintenance footprint also provides a bigger scale for its OEM distribution business because it has almost 2,000 more aircraft from which to sell. And thirdly, this scale will help its software business, including data collection for predictive maintenance.

This larger heavy maintenance platform “accelerates all of the things we’re doing” he says.

AAR purchased HAECO Americas for $78 million in November 2025, which at the time was the second biggest heavy maintenance MRO behind AAR. Holmes says the integration is ahead of schedule. While there will be some similarities between integrating HAECO Americas and MRO Holdings into AAR, Holmes says they are quite different because “HAECO was a turnaround situation” because the business wasn’t performing well financially or operationally. This compares to MRO Holdings, which is “running exceptionally well.”

MRO Holdings is expected to generate $1 billion of sales and $285 million of adjusted EBITDA this calendar year, compared to $3.3 billion of sales and $401 million in adjusted EBITDA for its fiscal year, which ends in June.