Aviation Technical Services Brand Guidelines: Tramco’s 1970 Roots & a 2020 “ATS” Logo

From Renton to Paine Field.

Aviation Technical Services, which now signs itself simply ATS, is an aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul company based at Paine Field in Everett, Washington. Its roots go back to 1970. The Everett Herald reported in June 2021 that the company began as Tramco in Renton in 1970 and moved to Paine Field seven years later, in 1977; the company’s own account, published in September 2023, describes its start as an aircraft component repair business.

Ownership changed several times. According to the Herald, the business was sold to Goodrich in 1988 and traded as Goodrich Aviation Technical Services; in 2007 the Sydney-based Macquarie Group bought it; and in 2013 a group of investors led by Matt Yerbic bought ATS for an undisclosed sum. Yerbic served as chief executive for fourteen years, the paper said, before handing the role to Paul Dolan in June 2021 and becoming chairman of the board. In December 2023 the company announced that Robert Cords, formerly an executive at Wheels Up, MRO Holdings and StandardAero, had become chief executive, with Yerbic as executive board chairman.

The Herald described ATS in 2021 as the second-largest aerospace employer in Snohomish County and as one of the largest aircraft maintenance and repair companies in North America. At the start of 2020, it reported, ATS employed about 1,600 people at four US locations, about 1,100 of them in Everett. The paper gave the Paine Field facilities as a hangar of 500,000 square feet with room for up to 14 aircraft, plus a smaller warehouse for component repair, and named Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines among its customers, alongside some of the largest US cargo carriers. The work it described ranges from heavy checks, in which an airliner is largely taken apart and rebuilt, to reconfiguring the cabins of used aircraft for a new operator.

Hangars, component shops and parts.

ATS sells hangar work and the parts business around it. Its January 2020 brand announcement organised the company into four units: Airframe Services, for heavy maintenance and modification; Component Repair, covering accessories, hydraulics, pneumatics and structures among other systems; Engineering Solutions, for PMA parts, STC offerings and design and repair engineering; and Ranger Asset Management, for part sales, consignment, inventory distribution and the acquisition and teardown of retired aircraft. At that point, the company said, its PMA portfolio held nearly 100 parts; it now describes them as FAA-approved PMAs.

Much of that growth came in Texas. In July 2018 ATS announced that it had bought Ranger Air, a parts supplier in Lewisville, Texas, calling it its fourth acquisition in the Dallas–Fort Worth area in five years and saying Ranger would keep its own brand name. The 2020 announcement listed three component repair shops in the area — American Cooler, TAC and TPS — and a machine shop called AIR, as well as heavy maintenance and modification work in Kansas City, Missouri, and Moses Lake, Washington. Today the company’s website lists component shops at Fort Worth and at Paine Field, the Kansas City hangar and the Everett head office, and the 2023 appointment notice said Cords would be based at the Fort Worth component facility near Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

In February 2026 ATS announced a letter of intent with DHL Global Forwarding in Singapore to warehouse selected PMA parts and used serviceable material under the name ATS Asia. The announcement described an intent, not a completed contract. The company has also put weight behind training. It launched an Apprenticeship Program at its Everett hangar in January 2019, later extended to Kansas City and Fort Worth, in which employees train on the job while paid and can test to become certificated mechanics; in October 2024 it said 200 technicians had graduated into mechanic roles since the programme began.

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.

A long name cut to three letters.

The identity is where ATS made its clearest design decision. On 28 January 2020 the company announced a new brand direction, unveiled at a quarterly leadership meeting: a new visual identity that simplified its name and logo to “ATS”, and a renamed set of business units. The announcement tied the change to the company’s 50th year and to unifying about 1,400 employees. Yerbic said the company needed “to do a better job of clarifying who we are,” and that the new visual identity and brand promise were rooted in a desire to be “caring and humble” and to do what is right. The rollout was planned over six months.

The long form survives in the opening lines of press releases and in the web address, atsmro.com, which pairs the initials with the industry shorthand for maintenance, repair and overhaul. Ranger Air kept its own name under the ATS umbrella, and the Singapore parts operation announced in 2026 was given the name ATS Asia. The company’s awards page leans on peer recognition: it cites Aviation Week’s MRO of the Year award for 2016, for its aircraft modification programmes, the Aerospace Futures Alliance’s Company of the Year honour at the alliance’s 18th annual summit in Tacoma in September 2023, and 145.com Top Shop awards for both of its component repair shops, all as the company presents them. Its website carries the line “ATS is what we make it.”

For a design guide, Aviation Technical Services shows how an independent maintenance company can shorten a long descriptive name into initials and reorganise its units under them. Compare AAR, another US aviation services and parts group, and StandardAero. For this guide we use a deep blue, a pale grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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