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SANTIAGO, Chile—Aeromexico has been expanding its in-house maintenance capacity and capabilities in recent years and is considering adding aircraft painting to its services.
The carrier unveiled a new aircraft livery in 2024 as part of its 90th anniversary, which meant its entire fleet needed to be repainted.
The carrier has used an external vendor to paint 30 aircraft with the new livery, with another 21 to be completed in 2026, Jorge Jacome, Aeromexico SVP maintenance and engineering, told Aviation Week during MRO Latin America. Those 51 aircraft represent about 30% of its entire fleet.
Aeromexico’s in-house maintenance organization developed a business case to add a paint hangar and hopes to get it approved in the second half of this year. Aeromexico intends to modify an unused hangar in Guadalajara and start painting aircraft there in 2027, if approved. The return on investment would be “in less than a year, assuming we need to paint about two-thirds of the fleet in the next three or four years,” Jacome says.
The carrier has been expanding its base maintenance capacity and is now performing about 70% of it in-house, Jacome says.
Aeromexico opened a facility in Guadalajara two years ago for Boeing 737 MAX heavy maintenance. It started with one line and added a second line in 2025, Jacome says. Expanding the facility with additional lines as the MAX fleet continues to grow is possible, he adds, as the facility is big enough to accommodate four narrowbodies simultaneously, or a widebody. The carrier operates 75 MAXs, he says.
In addition to the 737 MAX, Aeromexico has been performing heavy maintenance for its 787 fleet for the past nine years. The airline recently completed its first 12-year 4C check. Since bringing the 787 base maintenance capability in-house, Jacome says Aeromexico has performed more than 50 checks and has one of the highest dispatch reliability and utilization rates of a 787 operator.
That 787 success is “why we also decided to do the MAXs” in-house, he adds.
Aeromexico is working toward a common widebody business cabin configuration. “We are going to start cabin reconfiguration on the 787-8 fleet,” probably in the last quarter of the year, Jacome adds. Right now, the airline is “working with the supplier for the certification and getting all the kits ready” for the project, which he estimates will take “the whole next year.”
Aeromexico has added about 50 aircraft in the last two years, and this year the carrier plans to take three more MAXs and two more 787s, bringing the fleet to about 170 aircraft by the end of 2026, Jacome says.
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