Romaero

Romaero traces back to 1920, when it was founded by royal decree as ASAM, and it has carried a different name in almost every political era since: IRMA from 1944, Intreprinderea de Avioane Bucuresti from 1978, and Romaero from 1991. Its site sits beside Baneasa airport on the northern edge of Bucharest. The company is majority owned by the Romanian state through the Ministry of Economy and its shares also trade on the Bucharest Stock Exchange under RORX, an unusual combination that has shaped much of its recent history.

The industrial work splits in two. The aerostructures division manufactures detail parts, subassemblies and major assemblies for other people's aircraft, with process capability covering chemical milling, surface treatment, heat treatment, painting, CNC turning and machining, composite work, mechanical testing and tooling design. The customer list is the clearest evidence of what the plant can actually do and includes Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems, Bombardier, BAE Systems, Elbit Systems, Gulfstream, Saab, SABCA and MT Aerospace. Programme work has included fuselage sections for the Gulfstream G200 and components for the Hawker 800.

The maintenance, repair and overhaul division holds EASA Part 145, Romanian civil aviation and FAA approvals and operates five hangars with about 20,000 square metres of usable floor, enough for a dozen narrow-body aircraft at once. Types worked on run across the Airbus A318, A319, A320 and A321, the Boeing 737, the Britten-Norman BN-2, the Antonov An-26 and An-30, the Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules and the Alenia C-27J Spartan. Structural repair and corrosion prevention and control are particular specialities. Commercial customers have included Ryanair, Blue Air, Air Bucharest, Georgian Airways and Helistar.

The company has a long manufacturing history behind the current service business. It built more than 500 Britten-Norman Islander light aircraft under licence, and from 1979 assembled the Rombac 1-11 under agreement with British Aerospace, though only nine of those airliners were completed before the programme ended in the 1990s. On the defence side it has been positioned as the Romanian industrial partner for Black Hawk helicopter support with Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin, for Patriot air defence work with Raytheon, and for modernisation of the Romanian Air Force C-130 fleet.

The recent record is difficult and the listing should say so plainly. After several years of losses and a court ruling in December 2023 ordering roughly 17 million euros in compensation over a failed Boeing 737-200 upgrade, Romaero filed for insolvency and the Bucharest Tribunal approved the proceedings in January 2024. The government subsequently moved accumulated debt off the company in an attempt to make it attractive to investors, and management obtained shareholder approval to auction several buildings and land parcels in the north of Bucharest at a starting price around 18 million euros. The Hungarian maintenance provider Aeroplex signed an agreement in 2025 to restart base maintenance activity at the Baneasa site. Employee numbers and current financial position are not reliably published, and the company is best understood at present as a recovering industrial asset rather than a stable prime.