Long known as an international gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean, South Florida is now gaining recognition as a global powerhouse in the aviation services sector. The tri-county region is home to one of the largest clusters of aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul firms in the Western Hemisphere, according to the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, Broward County’s economic development partner.

“Unless you’ve got a relative in the aviation industry, you probably aren’t aware of how important it is, and how much of it is here,” Alliance President and CEO Bob Swindell said. “People say, ‘We always knew there’s some activity, but we didn’t realize the scale of it.’”

In fact, there are hundreds of federally certified MRO stations across the tri-county region, together accounting for more than half of the Sunshine State’s $4.9 billion MRO sector, according to data from the Alliance and the Miami-Dade Beacon Council.

The industry supports some 120,000 local jobs, many with above-average salaries, official figures show
“There’s an astronomical amount of demand, specifically in South Florida,” said Cam Murphy, president of Miami Springs-based FEAM Aero. “There are huge opportunities in this [MRO] space, and it’s completely AI-proof.”

The legacy of Eastern Airlines
South Florida has emerged as an MRO hub in part due to its strategic location.

“The combination of its geographical location, friendly environment to do business and bilingual labor pool has really propelled South Florida as an aviation hub,” said Pastor Lopez, president of the MRO Services Group at Fort Lauderdale-based GA Telesis.

But experts also say the roots of South Florida’s aviation industry lie in the collapse of Miami-based Eastern Airlines and New York-based Pan Am, which had its headquarters for Latin America in the Magic City.
When those airlines shuttered in 1991, they left thousands of highly trained workers in South Florida unemployed.
“You had a really well-trained workforce, and they were forced to become entrepreneurs. They didn’t want to pull up their family and move somewhere else … so they went out and opened up their own small shops,” Swindell said. “That was the nucleus, and then it grew and grew.” Lopez has witnessed that evolution firsthand. “I remember one individual who knew how to rewind motors, and he opened a rewind shop,” he said. “Next thing you know, the people who worked for him opened their own rewind shops, and eventually there were four or five different rewind shops in the early 1990s.”

Experts say the legacy of Eastern Airlines and Pan Am can be seen in the way South Florida’s MRO industry is structured. For the most part, it’s a network of hundreds of small and midsize businesses, largely still privately owned, and many with their own specialty or niche.

“It’s a very fragmented market, but the market started out that way,” FEAM Aero’s Murphy said. “It’s also because the industry is so regulated and capital-intensive. So once you become really good in a certain category, [it’s difficult] to jump to a different lane.”

Specialization drives success
Murphy and his firm exemplify this. He’s the second-generation leader of a family-owned business that focuses on what’s called line maintenance, which covers an operating plane’s routine inspections.
“Every time an aircraft lands at a gate or cargo terminal, we’ll go over and do all those checks, right there on the live aircraft,” he said. “That’s our bread and butter.”
FEAM Aero has 2,000 professionals across the United States and Europe, including more than 300 workers in South Florida, according to company figures.

“We’re not a parts company,” Murphy said. “We’re labor-focused. We always say we do aircraft maintenance, but really, we’re in the business of people.”

GA Telesis has a different niche. With four locations across South Florida, plus operations in Europe and Asia, it specializes in aircraft components, such as landing gear legs. The firm employs more than 1,000 workers locally. 

“We do about 50,000 components in any given year,” Lopez said. “We touch every single system on the airplane, whether it’s passenger or cargo.”
Another highly specialized firm that plays a leading role in the region’s MRO industry is Coral Springs-based CTS Engines, which nearly doubled its footprint last year with a new 216,000-square-foot facility.

The company works on several engine models, including General Electric CF6 engines used on passenger planes, cargo flights and military aircraft. Clients comprise both domestic and foreign airlines. That includes Japan’s All Nippon Airways, which signed an MRO agreement in April.

And the field’s only growing. Miami-Dade County MRO firms expanded their workforces by nearly a third over the past five years, according to the Beacon Council, significantly outpacing the rest of the state and country.

Workforce development in focus
Still, South Florida’s ability to keep its competitive advantage in talent isn’t assured, industry insiders say, pointing to looming labor shortages across the aviation industry.
“Over the next eight to 10 years, they’re predicting a shortage of about 350,000 to 400,000 aircraft workers nationally,” CTS Engines’ Jeffries said.

That’s due in part to the mass retirement of older workers, who make up a significant share of the workforce and are not being replaced quickly enough by younger professionals. Another issue is stiff competition from other technical industries that don’t require such intensive certifications, experts say.

“Labor is a constraint,” FEAM Aero’s Murphy said. “And, with the baby boomers retiring, part of the challenge is attracting the next generation.”

Business leaders say they’ve started taking the issue more seriously, investing more in on-the-job training programs and expanding partnerships with Broward College, Miami’s George T. Baker Aviation Technical College and other local institutions.

“The industry has to come together … to figure out what the pipeline looks like,” Murphy said.

For its part, GA Telesis is investing more in workforce development. In April, it made a $4.1 million contribution to Broward College to advance technical training and equip local students with access to modern aviation technology.

That’s exactly the type of project the industry needs to support, according to the Alliance’s Swindell, who called for more thoughtful collaboration between businesses, educational institutions and city and county officials.

“You need to bring all three of those components together,” he said.

Swindell also pointed to efforts by the Alliance and other organizations to connect employers with the more than 3,200 local workers who lost their jobs when Dania Beach-based Spirit Airlines shut down in May.

CTS Engines, FEAM Aero and GA Telesis all said they aimed to onboard some technicians and other specialists who worked for the ultra-low-cost carrier, the first major U.S. airline to go out of business in 25 years.

“I’ve been really impressed by the way the aviation community has stepped up and rallied around these employees,” Swindell said. “It really reinforces the scale of the industry here that they’re able to do that.”

Learn more.