Ryanair Holdings chief executive Michael O’Leary has revealed the company will invest up to USD600 million to move its engine maintenance operations in-house over the next five to ten years.
Speaking to Aviation Week, he said the move made sense financially since the group has 200 engines in maintenance at any given time, and the number is only bound to increase with future fleet additions.
“We do almost all our own airframe maintenance. I think with supply chain challenges and only two providers, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, we need to start repairing our own engines,” he said, adding that Ryanair is looking to announce the construction of its new engine shops in the next twelve months. According to the CEO, it may take three to four years thereafter to open them, one of them most likely in Western Europe and the other in Eastern Europe.
According to ch-aviation fleets data, Ryanair’s in-house fleet consists 116 B737-8-200s (powered by CFM International’s LEAP engines) and 205 B737-800s (with CFM56 engines). The group has an additional fifteen B737-800s with CFM56 engines on its Ryanair UK AOC.
Subsidiary Malta Air has another 133 B737-800s with CFM56 engines as well as forty-three B737-8-200s with LEAP engines. Another subsidiary, Buzz (Poland), has one B737-700 and fifty-seven B737-800s (all CFM56-powered), as well as fourteen B737-8-200s with LEAP engines. And Lauda Europe operates a fleet of twenty-six A320-200s (fifteen powered by CFM56s, eleven by International Aero Engines’s V2500).
Malta Air also has one Learjet 45 and three Learjet 45XRs, all with Honeywell Aerospace TFE31s.
O’Leary also confirmed that Ryanair recently completed work on an MRO hangar at Sevilla and started work on a new MRO hangar at Dublin International as well as the expansion of similar facilities in Kaunas International, Kraków John Paul II International, and Wroclaw. According to its website, Ryanair also has heavy maintenance facilities at Glasgow Prestwick, Frankfurt Hahn, and Shannon, while its largest line maintenance bases are at Dublin, London Stansted, Madrid Barajas, Milan Bergamo, Porto, Nuremberg, and Vienna.
The low-cost carrier announced Dublin MRO hangar plans in 2023 but only started works in late January 2025 after Aer Lingus (EI, Dublin International) dropped its appeal against the EUR40 million euro (USD41.5 million) investment “in respect of” the previously granted planning permission.
Recently, Ryanair opened an engineering academy at Glasgow Prestwick with the goal of supporting the maintenance of a fleet of 800 aircraft by 2034.
