J.R.D. Tata put Air India’s engineering soul at Santa Cruz because, in the 1940s and 1950s, almost everything that kept an aeroplane flying had to be done in India. Indian Airlines, born in 1953 from eight domestic carriers including Deccan Airways, built the other half of that world. Hyderabad’s Central Training Establishment grew out of a Deccan Airways Link Trainer at the Ronald Ross Institute and became CTE in 1958. For decades it was the blackboard school that Indian pilots preferred to Toulouse. Airbus A320s arrived from 1988. Simulators followed. An ATR full-flight box worth about Rs.63 crore landed in 2017 so Alliance Air crews would stop flying to Singapore and Bangkok for type work. CFM opened a CFM56 training centre at Hyderabad airport in 2010. The merger of 2007-11 folded both airlines’ shops into one monolith. In 2013 that monolith was carved out as Air India Engineering Services Limited. When Tata bought the airline in January 2022, AIESL did not go with it. The hangars, the engine cells and the trained benches stayed with the government under AI Assets Holding. The fleet went private. The capacity the public paid for over eight decades did not travel with the Maharaja.
The work still exists. AIESL remains India’s largest DGCA-approved MRO, with bases in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram and Nagpur. It claims line and base maintenance, engine and APU shops, landing-gear and structural work, and a technical dispatch reliability above 99 percent on paper. Nagpur’s Mihan hangars have done more than 240 checks on Boeing 777s, 737s and A320-family jets. Kuwait Airways sent 777s for C-checks. Air Canada’s 777-200LR got an inlet-cowl repair in five days across Delhi and Mumbai. In December 2025 AIESL posted a 6C/12Y check on IndiGo’s VT-IAN at Delhi, on time. Mumbai’s EASA scope now includes CFM LEAP-1B. Trivandrum holds an EASA Part-145 A1 rating for A320 and 737 base work. Nagpur advertised D-check authority on the 777, the heaviest visit an airframe takes. About 4,500 technicians remain. FY24 turnover sat above Rs.2,100 crore. The chief executive has said the network can take about 20 aircraft a day, including five or six widebodies, and that better turnaround could triple that without new concrete. IndiGo is using the bench. Foreign airlines are using the bench. The parent that built the bench is not filling it the way the history suggests it should.
Indian Airlines had built the hangars of A320 Complex in New Delhi where GMR has taken over the land parcel. The capacity would overhaul the CFM56 engine of A320 seamlessly and turn it around too. But today that capacity has also died but today reduced to maintenance and checks.
Air India’s official answer is scale and standard. A spokesperson told Business Standard that a 570-aircraft order book, heavy with widebodies, exceeds what Indian MRO can support and that the airline must build its own capacity. It is like we will reinvent the wheel again. Singapore Airlines, a 25.1 percent shareholder, is helping pull daily inspections and minor troubleshooting in-house, away from AIESL. Twenty-six older 787-8s are in a $400 million nose-to-tail cabin programme. The first two went to California in 2025 for interiors and Wi-Fi. Paint shops that can take a 777 still are mostly overseas. Lease-return checks demand EASA paper that lessors trust. After the 2022 split, AIESL lost easy access to some OEM proprietary manuals for high-end component work and has been hunting partners to buy that intellectual property back. Industry voices still say 85 to 90 percent of Indian MRO spend leaves for Singapore, the Gulf and Sri Lanka. Those are not slogans. They are lease covenants, engine-shop gaps and a global shortage of LEAP and GTF shop visits. They are also a choice. Every ferry to a foreign hangar is a dollar that does not hit a Indian wage bill and a slot that does not train the next certifying staff.
Look at Nagpur in August 2026 and the waste becomes physical. VT-ALO, a 777, arrived in May for an overhaul meant to last a month. A slat came off and flew to Europe to unstick another Air India jet grounded there. Three months later ALO was still on the pad, the only aircraft in that hangar, waiting for the part its own airline had removed. VT-ALL had already spent years dead before AIESL brought it back. A planned jet-engine shop at the same campus remains stalled. The GE90 and GEnx test cell exists. The full overhaul line that would keep those engines off foreign queues does not. In May, labour broke. Roughly 180 engineers’ resignations were accepted after protests over pay and progression. Across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Nagpur, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram, thousands stayed off tools. Seven aircraft sat unfinished. Air India said operations were safe because it had mobilised in-house crews and third parties. That sentence is the new doctrine. The old national shop is a vendor. When the vendor strikes or waits for a slat, the airline buys a slot in another country.
The honest charge is not that AIESL is empty. It is that the airline which inherited J.R.D.’s shops and Indian Airlines’ A320 complex now treats that inheritance as optional capacity, while IndiGo, Kuwait and Air Canada treat it as useful. Engine shortages and mechanic shortages are real. Sending a C-check abroad does not invent a LEAP turbine blade. It does spend rupees that could have kept a certifying engineer on an Indian hangar floor and a 777 slat on an Indian wing. National capacity is not a museum. It is utilisation, manuals, parts pooling and a labour settlement that keeps 4,500 people turning wrenches. Until Air India and AIESL share one spare-parts ledger and one training pipeline again, the country will keep paying twice. Once to keep the hangars standing. Again to ferry the aeroplane to someone else’s.