Aegean services center launched
Aegean Airlines’ investment of 140 million euros for the creation of Greece’s first Aircraft Maintenance Services Center and Flight Simulator and Crew Training Center reach completion within a year of being launched.
The new facilities are located at Athens International Airport’s Olympic Aviation hangar, which had lain unused for at least 12 years and needed a radical reconstruction and upgrade in terms of energy, acquiring photovoltaic panels of 25,000 square meters on its roof.
The management of Aegean held a press tour on Tuesday of the new “green hangar,” which is 40 meters high – that is, the height of an 11-story apartment building.
The demanding reconstruction works of Aegean’s air hub started in June 2023 and were completed this summer, coinciding with the airline’s 25th anniversary. One of the most challenging tasks of the energy upgrade of the old Olympic Airways’ roof concerned the insulation of its roof.
It took about six months to complete, with the high degree of difficulty of the specific works also related to the wind conditions that prevailed at a height of 40 meters. The hangar has 5,238 photovoltaic panels, which makes it the largest rooftop photovoltaic installation in Greece.
The installation has the ability to produce 3 megawatts of power, 4.5 gigawatt-hours of energy on an annual basis, that is an output able to cover most of the energy needs of the facilities that are in operation.
“The ‘green’ hangar houses the maintenance services we perform both for ourselves and now for third parties, as well as a state-of-the-art pilot and cabin crew training center with four simulators, which will become seven at full deployment in the coming years,” said the managing director of Aegean, Dimitris Gerogiannis, on Tuesday.
One of the areas that stands out includes the warehouse of spare parts and components for maintenance work, which occupies 2,300 sq.m. It has innovative storage and management systems aimed at more efficient and faster management of the more than 25,000 codes used by maintenance service engineers.
