No Ctrl+F in the Hangar
June 9, 2026Aviation maintenance which is the backbone of aviation is running out of technicians fast. 710,000 new technicians is needed by 2044. The knowledge they rely on is trapped in paper manuals and PDFs. The industry can't hire its way out, so the only path is making the next generation of technicians far more efficient, and that starts with a data layer that makes the underlying knowledge accessible.
Aviation MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) is facing a growing workforce crisis. About 41% of certified mechanics in the US are over 60. According to Boeing, the industry will need 710,000 new maintenance technicians by 2044. About two-thirds of that demand is replacing retiring workers rather than staffing growth as fleets expand. As experienced technicians leave the workforce, decades of critical operational knowledge leaves with them.
Global MRO demand reached $136 billion in 2025, up 8% from $126 billion in 2024, and is expected to approach $193 billion by the end of the decade. The global fleet is also aging. Average fleet age approached 13 years in 2025, about 18 months older than in 2024. This is mainly because production hasn't kept pace with demand. Older aircraft naturally requires more maintenance and more replacement parts. Engines are the largest and fastest-growing segment of the MRO market, where documentation requirements and procedural complexity are highest.
You can solve a workforce shortage in one of two ways: (a) hire more people, or (b) make the current workforce more efficient.
Hiring 710,000 people in twenty years into an industry that already has major problems filling roles due to competing industries such as tech, automotive and energy isn't realistic.
The problem becomes even more serious when you consider the workforce retiring has been operating on tools that were never built for speed or scale. They were mainly relying on paper-based task cards and maintenance records, siloed compliance systems, and knowledge held in individuals' heads. The next generation of technicians is stepping into the same outdated setup, but without the years of accumulated context that made it work.
Today, a technician can lose hours per task searching through documentation just to begin working on the aircraft. Due to the growing workforce shortage, this is time the industry no longer has.
There are a couple of startups building in the space, most notably Zymbly (YC W26) and Fleetcraft. Both sit at the workflow layer and assist the technician during the task, capture inputs, and structure the documentation.
Before a workflow can be optimized, the underlying data such as manuals, airworthiness directives, service bulletins, task cards and maintenance records has to be accessible and queryable, and today it isn't. The maintenance data, fragmented across physical binders of paper and PDFs, was never structured for easy lookup on a computer or tablet. A workflow tool built on top of inaccessible data inherits the same bottleneck it's trying to solve. Sure, it's probably possible to build some simple workflows over a couple hundred PDFs, but that's not a scalable solution.
There are also some obvious future applications of a data layer when robotic-driven aviation maintenance arrives. A robot can't read a PDF or follow an instruction with the judgment of a senior technician with years of knowledge. Procedures have to be restructured into machine-consumable form before a machine can execute them. Robots are already arriving at the inspection end, but full robotic repair is years out and filled with regulatory hurdles to overcome. But the layer that makes today's technicians faster is the same one robots could depend on in the future.