Tarmac Aerosave has inaugurated its fourth Airbus A380-capable aircraft maintenance hangar in Spain, which it says has been built to alleviate near-term capacity issues.
The fourth maintenance hangar at Teruel hangar was unveiled at a ceremony held at the airport on Oct. 8, attended by airlines and aircraft leasing specialists along with airport and local government officials. Tarmac Aerosave’s capabilities in Teruel include aircraft maintenance, recycling services and storage, with capacity for 140 aircraft and 20 engines.
With an 87,000-ft.2 capacity able to accommodate one A380 aircraft or four A320 narrowbodies, Tarmac Aerosave says it built the metal-textile hangar in around nine months and invested €15 million ($16 million) in its construction.
In terms of scale, the new facility in Teruel measures at 95 m (312 ft.) in length, 85 m in width and around 34 m in height. Tarmac Aerosave says the structure is built with a steel and aluminum frame with its insulation generated from rock wool panels, making it designed to be fully dismantlable and reusable.
The new hangar brings much-needed aircraft maintenance capacity to the Teruel site. Tarmac Aerosave says due to a backlog of work orders and long-term maintenance contracts, its original A380 hangar, which has capacity for two of the superjumbos, is fully booked for the next two years.
Tarmac Aerosave established a presence in Teruel in 2013 and following on from more than a decade in the eastern Spanish city, the company now employs 230 people at the site out of a total workforce of 530 across its operations in Spain and France. It intends to add 50 new roles at Teruel due to coincide with the operation’s expansion.
The latest hangar in Teruel follows the building of a third facility at the same location last year. Across its network, Tarmac Aerosave operates seven hangars in total. Two of them are in Tarbes, France, at Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrénées Airport, which is certified to carry out line maintenance, dismantling and storage activities on CFM56 engine types as well as Leap 1A and 1B variants. The company also operates an additional facility in Toulouse, which has storage capacity for up to 40 aircraft.
Alexandre Brun, CEO of Tarmac Aerosave, says the company is building further as a sign of its faith in the potential of the site. “This hangar represents our ongoing commitment to supporting the growth of the aviation market, as more and more aircraft take to the skies,” Brun says.
Tarmac Aerosave is a joint venture split as a three-way partnership between airframe manufacturer Airbus, French OEM Safran and industrial services company Suez.
