GMR Hyderabad International Airport (GHIAL) and MAS Aerospace Engineering (MAE), a fully-owned subsidiary of Malaysia Airlines, has penned down an agreement to form a 50:50 joint venture christened MAS-GMR Aerospace Engineering Company to develop a MRO facility in Hyderabad.

The facility, with an investment of Rs 400-crore, would come up on 25 acres in two phases at the GMR Aerospace Park, situated near Rajiv Gandhi International Airport.

Ravindran Devagunam, Vice-president (planning and strategy initiatives) of GHIAL, said, "The first phase, for which 10 acres have been identified, will house two-bay narrow-bodied hangers to handle Boeing 737 and Airbus 320 and will be operational by the third quarter of 2010, while the second phase will have wide-bodied hangers. The total time scale for both the phases is 24-30 months."

The proposed MRO facility would be designed to handle 60-80 aircraft annually and it would have debt ratio of 60:40. The joint venture project is expected to be completed by 2011-12.

The chairman of GMR group, G Mallikarjuna Rao said, "Optimistically, we will get two to three large facilities and seven to eight smaller facilities over the next five years, which will create 3,000 to 4,000 high-paying jobs."