Aeroman Brand Guidelines: TACA’s 1983 Workshop and Seven Hangars in El Salvador

An airline maintenance division that took on outside customers.

Aeroman began in 1983 in El Salvador as the maintenance and engineering division of TACA, the Salvadoran airline, set up to look after the carrier’s own fleet, according to the history published by its present parent group, MRO Holdings. English Wikipedia’s article on Aveos Fleet Performance gives the same founding year and says Aeroman was established to provide maintenance services for TACA. Spanish Wikipedia spells the full name out as Aeromantenimiento, and the legal name Aeromantenimiento S.A. still appears on the company’s list of certifications.

The company grew from an in-house shop into a contract maintenance business. English Wikipedia says Aeroman was certified by the US Federal Aviation Administration in 1992 and joined the Airbus MRO Network in 2005. MRO Holdings dates its first purpose-built hangar, Hangar 1 with four maintenance bays, to 1996, built, it says, because demand was growing.

Ownership changed in the 2000s. In February 2007 Air Canada Technical Services, the Montreal maintenance business that took the name Aveos Fleet Performance in September 2008, agreed to acquire 80% of Aeroman, which English Wikipedia describes as the maintenance affiliate of TACA. As part of Aveos, Aeroman concentrated on narrow-body aircraft for carriers from the United States, the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America. When Aveos entered insolvency proceedings in Canada in 2012, Aeroman’s Salvadoran operations were not part of the filing, English Wikipedia says; Aeroman’s chief executive at the time described it as a completely separate entity and said it was adding a hangar for three new narrow-body lines.

By February 2011, the same article says, Aeroman had completed 1,000 heavy checks since 1983 and employed 1,800 people. Customers named at that point included Southwest, Volaris, United Airlines and Iberia.

Seven hangars, counted one by one.

Aeroman works inside El Salvador International Airport, at San Luis Talpa, a location the company says gives it easy access to airlines in the United States and in Central and South America, and quick customs handling. Its growth can be read in its hangar numbers. MRO Holdings lists Hangars 2 and 3 in 2008, Hangar 4 with three bays in 2012, Hangar 5 with ten bays in 2015 and Hangar 6 with twelve bays in 2018, with Hangars 2 and 3 extended along the way.

The work has moved up in size. The group says Aeroman performed its first Airbus A330 heavy check in 2015 and opened an Airbus Competence Training centre the same year; its first heavy checks on the Boeing 757 and the Embraer E190 followed in 2017, and its first Airbus A320neo check in 2018. It introduced mobile tablets across its maintenance bays in 2016, the group says.

Hangar 7 opened in April 2026, Infobae reported in September 2026; Spanish Wikipedia dates the inauguration to 16 April 2026. Aeroman’s own page now says its seven hangars can take up to 64 production lines for narrow- and wide-body aircraft, and it describes itself as one of the largest aviation maintenance facilities, according to that page. It says it has deep expertise in Airbus, Boeing and Embraer types and is expanding its wide-body and regional-jet work.

Beyond airframe heavy maintenance the company lists engineering, component repair, on-call recovery for grounded aircraft, and cabin and avionics modifications, with in-house shops for structures, composites, seats, welding, machining and avionics. Its certification list names the FAA, EASA and El Salvador’s civil aviation authority among more than ten regulators, alongside the ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 standards. About 90% of its services go to US airlines, according to the company, as reported by Infobae.

How maintenance providers present themselves.

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.

The founding company of MRO Holdings.

Aeroman is today the founding company of MRO Holdings, or MROH Group, which the group says was created in 2016 when it acquired Flightstar of Jacksonville, Florida. The network now also includes TechOps MX in Querétaro, Mexico, through a commercial partnership begun in 2017; North State of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, acquired in 2020; Rionegro MRO in Colombia, added in 2026; and MRO Solutions, a technical-support unit in El Salvador. The chairman of MRO Holdings is Roberto Kriete, and Bain Capital is a significant minority shareholder, according to AAR’s announcement of 28 September 2026.

That announcement opens the next chapter, and it is not finished. On 28 September 2026 the US aviation aftermarket group AAR said it had signed a definitive agreement to buy a 65% controlling interest in MRO Holdings, with options over the remaining 35% in later years. AAR expected the deal to close in its fiscal quarter ending February 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. Infobae reported that the two companies would remain independent until then and that the Salvadoran operations would keep their management and workforce. The purchase was agreed in September 2026 and was not completed at the time of writing. AAR’s announcement gave MRO Holdings about 10,000 staff and 115 lines of airframe capacity across El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia and the United States.

The old aeroman.com.sv address now forwards to a page inside the MRO Holdings website, where Aeroman sits beside its sister facilities in the site’s menu.

For a design guide, Aeroman shows how an airline workshop can become a brand in its own right, measured in hangars and production lines. Compare AAR, its agreed buyer, and Aviation Technical Services, another aircraft maintenance provider in the Americas. For this guide we use a hangar deep blue, a Pacific teal and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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