Turkish Technic Brand Guidelines: Turkish Airlines’ 2006 MRO Arm and Its Istanbul Hangars

An airline’s maintenance division made into a company.

Turkish Technic is the maintenance, repair and overhaul arm of Turkish Airlines. Its legal name, Turkish Wikipedia says, is Türk Hava Yolları Teknik A.Ş., shortened at home to THY Teknik, and Turkish Technic is the name it uses internationally. English Wikipedia gives its founding date as 23 May 2006, in Istanbul, and names its predecessor as the airline’s aviation maintenance division, founded in 1957, citing the company’s own history page. Turkish Airlines remains its parent; the Hürriyet Daily News described it in August 2026 as the airline’s maintenance arm.

The company’s growth is easiest to follow through its hangars. In March 2010 Aviation Week reported from an MRO show in Dubai that the company was preparing to break ground on HABOM — a Turkish shorthand for aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul — at Sabiha Gökçen airport, on the Asian side of Istanbul. The plan, the magazine said, was a three-hangar complex with a paint shop as its third hangar. English Wikipedia describes the finished complex as a hangar for eleven single-aisle aircraft and a separate hangar for three long-haul airframes.

The same Aviation Week report said the company had launched the Turkish Engine Centre about two months earlier, a joint venture with Pratt & Whitney focused on CFM56 and V2500 engines. English Wikipedia says most of the company’s engine work has since moved to the engine centre at Sabiha Gökçen. The company was also selling hangar time to other airlines by then: in January 2011 Aviation Week reported C-check contracts on Airbus A320 aircraft for the Spanish airline Spanair.

Istanbul Airport, Atatürk and a seventh hangar.

When Istanbul’s new airport opened, the company followed it. In October 2020 the Hürriyet Daily News reported that Turkish Technic had completed the first base maintenance hangars at Istanbul Airport, with an indoor area of about 60,000 square metres and room for three wide-body and six narrow-body aircraft at once; the company called them the largest hangars in Turkey, and said the finished complex would take 45 aircraft at a time. Its statement also described rainwater collection, solar power and translucent wall panels that let in daylight.

The older site was not given up. In August 2026 the same paper reported the opening of a seventh hangar at Atatürk Airport, of 29,400 square metres, able to take two narrow-body aircraft and one wide-body at once. With it, the company said, its enclosed facility area in Istanbul would exceed 850,000 square metres and its capacity in the city would reach 57 aircraft at a time. The report listed five locations: Istanbul Airport, Atatürk Airport and Sabiha Gökçen in Istanbul, and maintenance hangars in Ankara and Aydın; the company gave its workforce as 11,650 people. Turkish Wikipedia says the Aydın base, at Çıldır airport, looks after the Cessna 172S and Diamond aircraft on which Turkish Airlines trains student pilots.

Its customer work is reported deal by deal. In February 2025 the Hürriyet Daily News reported a component agreement with Air India Express covering pooling, repair, overhaul and logistics for 190 Boeing 737-8 and 737-10 aircraft. In May 2025 it reported an agreement with Rolls-Royce to set up an engine maintenance facility at Istanbul Airport for the Trent XWB and Trent 7000 engines of the Airbus A350 and A330neo, which the company aimed to have operating by the end of 2027. At the MRO Europe show in Amsterdam in late October 2026, the Bangladesh Monitor reported, the company agreed the terms of a five-year licensed repair agreement with Acron Aviation for flight data and cockpit voice recorder parts and of a seven-year support agreement with Safran Landing Systems, and signed a contract with the leisure group TUI to redeliver and paint six Boeing 737-800s.

How MRO 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 Turkish company with an English name.

The name itself is a design decision. At home the company is THY Teknik, a direct form of its legal name; abroad it uses Turkish Technic, an English name that ties it to the airline’s own international name, Turkish Airlines. English Wikipedia lists its memberships of the International Airlines Technical Pool, the European Line Maintenance Organisation and the Airbus MRO Network.

Its public image rests on scale and place. The figures it gives in its statements are square metres, hangar bays and the number of aircraft it can take at once, and the places are named airports: Istanbul Airport, Atatürk, Sabiha Gökçen, Ankara and Aydın. The two hangar openings reported in 2020 and 2026 were each announced with a number attached: 60,000 square metres at Istanbul Airport, then a seventh hangar of 29,400 square metres at Atatürk.

Engines are the newest part of that story. The 2010 joint venture with Pratt & Whitney gave it an engine centre at Sabiha Gökçen, and the 2025 Rolls-Royce agreement is meant to add a second engine site, at Istanbul Airport, by the end of 2027 on the company’s own timetable.

For a design guide, Turkish Technic shows how an airline’s maintenance department can become a brand of its own while keeping its parent’s name close. Compare Turkish Airlines, its parent, and Lufthansa Technik, another airline-owned maintenance company with a technical name. For this guide we use a deep hangar red, an ink and a fuselage grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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