Ameco Brand Guidelines: Air China & Lufthansa’s 1989 Beijing Venture & Its Hangars

A 1950 repair unit and a 1989 joint venture.

Ameco is the aircraft maintenance company of Beijing Capital International Airport, and its roots there are older than its name. Chinese Wikipedia, citing official civil-aviation annals, traces it to a small aircraft maintenance group formed on 1 August 1950 at an airfield in Beijing’s western suburbs. The unit became the Beijing aircraft repair factory in 1956, moved to the newly built Capital airport in November 1958, and was renamed Factory 101 in 1960. In 1980 it was merged with other airport engineering units into the civil aviation authority’s Beijing maintenance base, which completed a hangar for the Boeing 747 in 1983.

The joint venture came at the end of that decade. On 2 May 1989 Air China and Lufthansa signed the contract and articles for the Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Corporation, or Ameco Beijing, with Air China holding 60 per cent and Lufthansa 40 per cent, Chinese Wikipedia says. The trade ministry approved the venture that July, and the company received its business licence on 1 August 1989, built on the old maintenance base. That same year, Chinese Wikipedia adds, it completed an engine shop able to overhaul the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 and Rolls-Royce RB211. English Wikipedia, citing Aviation Week in 1992, says the venture agreement was set to run for 15 years, with Air China contributing staff, its maintenance workload and the airport complex, and Lufthansa contributing capital along with technical and management support.

Training came early. An apprentice programme for aircraft, engine and avionics technicians began in 1990, and the first class of 48 graduated in 1992, English Wikipedia says, again citing Aviation Week. The English name explains the short one: Ameco is formed from Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Corporation, and the company is often called Ameco Beijing, which separates it from its Guangzhou counterpart, GAMECO.

D checks, paint bays and an A380 hangar.

Much of Ameco’s story is told through hangars. In March 1994, Chinese Wikipedia says, it opened a rebuilt Boeing 747 paint hangar, and between September and November that year it carried out a D check, the heaviest scheduled overhaul, on an Air China 747-200, which the same article describes as the first for that type in China. A CAAC licence for 747 D checks followed on 1 September 1995, and an FAA licence for the same work on 30 July 1996, according to the article. On 24 May 1996 the company completed a four-bay hangar at Capital airport, wide enough to hold four Boeing 747-400s side by side.

A larger building followed. Work on a hangar for the Airbus A380, north of Terminal 3, began on 22 September 2006; it was completed on 18 March 2008 and entered use that July, and Chinese Wikipedia says it can hold six A380s or 747s at once. A further 747 paint and overhaul hangar, north of the four-bay building, opened in October 2009.

Foreign customers arrived over the same years. English Wikipedia, citing Aviation Week, says Ameco painted aircraft for Northwest Airlines, Air New Zealand and Korean Air, and won its first European heavy maintenance orders in 1997, when Lufthansa began moving overhaul work from Hamburg to Beijing. In August 2005 the Chicago Tribune reported that United Airlines would shift heavy maintenance of its Boeing 777 fleet, then 55 aircraft, to Ameco Beijing over five years, with the first work due that October.

Lufthansa Technik’s current profile of the company lists line maintenance, base maintenance and painting; overhaul of the Rolls-Royce RB211, Pratt & Whitney PW4000 and V2500 engines; repair and overhaul of almost 20,000 kinds of component, from landing gear to avionics; and VIP and business-jet modification work. It adds that Ameco’s Chengdu branch was the first in China authorised by Honeywell as a warranty repair station for the GTCP131-9A/B auxiliary power unit.

Hangars, capabilities and approvals.

Aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul companies, known in the trade as MRO providers, sell work that passengers rarely see. Their public pages tend to start with the places where that work is done: hangars photographed with aircraft inside, often in the liveries of the airlines that own the maintenance company or send their fleets to it, shown as the companies publish them.

The second common element is the capability list. Providers set out what they can handle by aircraft type and by engine type, and by level of work, from line checks between flights to heavy base checks, component overhaul and passenger-to-freighter conversion. GAMECO’s website, for example, names the Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and COMAC types it works on one by one.

Approvals are usually stated plainly rather than designed. A maintenance organisation’s certificates from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, the US Federal Aviation Administration, the Civil Aviation Administration of China and other national authorities tend to appear as a named list, sometimes with the certificate type beside each authority. Hangar sizes, bay counts and staff numbers appear the same way, as figures in company statements that trade titles such as Aviation Week and AviTrader then report.

The rest of a typical MRO site speaks to two audiences. Airlines and aircraft lessors looking for capacity are addressed through customer, news and contact pages, where new contracts and hangar openings are announced; technicians and engineers looking for work are addressed through careers pages. Many of these companies belong to an airline, or are joint ventures with one, so the parent’s name often sits close to the provider’s own.

One airport, two shareholders, a new mark at thirty.

The present company dates from 29 May 2015. On that day, Chinese Wikipedia says, Ameco was combined with Air China’s own engineering and technical branch, formed in February 2004 from the airline’s regional maintenance operations, to create a new Ameco owned 75 per cent by Air China and 25 per cent by Lufthansa. Lufthansa Technik’s profile gives the same Air China share and calls Ameco the largest provider of technical support services for aircraft in China. The merger brought the airline’s regional bases into the company: Chinese Wikipedia lists a branch in Chengdu, whose history it traces to civil aviation repair works of the 1960s, and ten more, among them Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Chongqing.

Ameco refreshed its identity at thirty. On 10 September 2019, its 30th anniversary, the company introduced a new logo and brand image, Chinese Wikipedia says, citing the aviation news site Carnoc; English Wikipedia illustrates its article with a photograph of the site entrance showing the new mark. The company’s most visible face, though, remains its buildings at Capital airport: the four-bay 747 hangar of 1996 and the A380 hangar of 2008, both pictured in the Wikipedia articles on the company.

For a design guide, Ameco shows how a maintenance company’s identity can rest on one airport, a run of ever-larger hangars and two shareholders named plainly. Compare Lufthansa Technik, the Lufthansa Group’s maintenance company, and Air China, Ameco’s majority owner. For this guide we use a deep hangar blue, a night ink, an apron grey and a lantern red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ameco’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.