Magnetic MRO Brand Guidelines: Estonian Air’s Maintenance Arm & Tallinn’s Painted Hangars

A national airline’s maintenance department and three owners.

Magnetic MRO is an aircraft maintenance company based at Tallinn Airport in Estonia and part of the wider Magnetic Group. Its roots are in the national airline. The company says it was once part of Estonian Air, and in an interview published by the group in April 2019 a long-serving engineer recalled working on the first Boeing 737 the airline received, in 1995. Estonian Wikipedia dates the maintenance department to 1995, with a team of 16 people looking after two new Boeing 737-500s.

English and Estonian Wikipedia set out the changes of owner that followed. On 15 May 2002 the department was separated from Estonian Air and became Maersk Air Maintenance Estonia, owned by the Danish airline Maersk Air, which according to Estonian Wikipedia had bought 49% of Estonian Air in 1996. In 2003 SAS Group bought the business, which continued as Air Maintenance Estonia, or AME. In 2010 the Baltic private equity investor BaltCap acquired it from SAS; Estonian Wikipedia cites a report in Ärileht from August 2010 on the sale, and adds that a new hangar was completed in September 2013.

The present name came in September 2014. A company press release carried by Aviation Week said Air Maintenance Estonia had been rebranded Magnetic MRO from 15 September 2014, with a strategy it called “Total Technical Care”: adding components, engines and engineering to its heavy and line maintenance, and moving into new markets. At that time, the release said, the company worked under EASA Part 145 and Part 21 certificates, ran hangars with five narrowbody bays in Tallinn and kept warehouses in Shannon, Ireland. The phrase Total Technical Care still appears on its website today.

BaltCap, Hangxin and a fifth hangar.

Growth under BaltCap included acquisitions. ERR News reported in June 2020 that Magnetic had bought the aircraft interiors business MAC Aero Interiors in 2016, and that in 2020 it moved the subsidiary’s production from the United Kingdom to Tallinn, where the plant passed an Airbus audit that allowed it to make parts for Airbus aircraft if it won contracts. In 2017, ERR News reported, Magnetic MRO was named Estonia’s Company of the Year and Exporter of the Year.

In January 2018 BaltCap and minority shareholders agreed to sell 100% of Magnetic MRO to Guangzhou Hangxin Aviation Technology, an aircraft component maintenance company from Guangzhou listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, ERR News reported on 3 January 2018. Estonian World reported on 8 May 2018 that the deal had been completed that month, describing Hangxin as a privately owned company founded in Guangzhou in 1994. In March 2026 the Estonian business daily Äripäev reported that, if everything went to plan, Magnetic MRO hoped to replace its Chinese owner during 2026, after eight years; that change was a plan reported in March 2026 and not completed at the time of writing.

The group widened around the maintenance business. English Wikipedia lists the purchase of the Amsterdam line maintenance company Direct Maintenance in March 2019 and the launch of a leasing arm in 2020. Aviation Week reported in January 2026 that Magnetic Training, a Part 147-approved training school in Tallinn, opened in 2018, and that Magnetic Academy enrolled its first student technicians in 2024, with training split into rounds of theory and hands-on practice at Magnetic MRO.

The Tallinn site has kept expanding. In January 2026 Aviation Week reported the opening of a fifth hangar, with three heavy maintenance bays and 8,800 square metres of space, fitted with tail docks, wing platforms and a 150-kilowatt solar power system. In March 2026 the magazine reported that the move freed the older building to work as a dedicated 2,852-square-metre paint hangar able to take every narrowbody type up to the Airbus A321 and Boeing 737 MAX 10, raising throughput from about ten paint jobs each summer to roughly 35 a year. The company told the magazine it was widening its work on the 737 MAX and on A320s with Pratt & Whitney geared turbofan engines.

Design and documentation.

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.

Murals on the hangar doors.

Magnetic’s most recognisable piece of design is not a logo but a set of hangar doors. The group says the doors of its Tallinn hangars carry large stencil artworks of curious, joyful children alongside aircraft, commissioned by Magnetic Group and created over several years by the Estonian street artist Von Bomb. In August 2026 the hangars won the Beautiful Industrial Landscape 2026 category of the nationwide Beautiful Estonian Home competition, together with a special award for a beautiful and business-friendly environment, presented in Haapsalu on 30 August, according to the group.

The jury, quoted by the group, pointed out that the murals are among the first images passengers see when landing in Estonia. Magnetic says the artworks have become an important part of its visual identity and its recognition in the aviation industry, that they bring warmth and playfulness into a highly technical workplace, and that they are meant to draw young people towards studying aviation, a theme that ties in with its training school and academy.

Elsewhere the identity is that of a business-to-business supplier. The maintenance company and the group run separate websites, with service pages for base maintenance, structural repairs, painting and component repair, a customer list of airlines and aircraft lessors, news stories and a careers section. The wording returns again and again to “Total Technical Care,” the phrase adopted with the 2014 name.

For a design guide, Magnetic MRO shows how an industrial company can turn a working building into its signature image. Compare FL Technics, another Baltic maintenance company, and Lufthansa Technik. For this guide we use a slate grey, a coral and a mustard yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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