Message posted on
24 June 2025 by HIVE
On Tuesday, June 24, 2025, construction officially began on the new Fellowship MRO hangar at the HIVE location Business Park Aviolanda, next to Woensdrecht Air Base. This modern facility is intended for the maintenance and modernization of the Royal Netherlands Air Force’s NH90 maritime combat helicopters. A year earlier, the parties involved had already signed a lease agreement with real estate developer Brisck.
The Fellowship comprises four completely new helicopter docks and a multifunctional campus building. The Air Force will use three docks and the entire campus building for NH90 maintenance, together with Fokker Services Group, among others. The Mid-Life Update (MLU) of the NH90 maritime combat helicopter is also expected to be carried out here. The Defense Support Command DOSCO will rent the facility for a period of at least ten years after its completion in the first quarter of 2026.
The maintenance of the NH90 fleet — now around twenty years old and consisting of 19 helicopters — will thus be carried out largely in-house. This safeguards essential knowledge of Defense technology in the Netherlands and contributes directly to the operational readiness of the Air Force. With the planned expansion of the number of NH90s, increasing maintenance capacity is an important investment for the future.
The name Fellowship refers to the Fokker F28 Fellowship aircraft and symbolizes the close cooperation between Air Force personnel and Fokker Services Group. The new hangar also symbolizes the broader civil-military cooperation within Hive Aerospace Collective. Completion in 2026 is considerably earlier than contractually agreed, allowing the Air Force and its partners to start using the new facility sooner.
Within HIVE, Defense and industry are jointly focusing on innovations in the maintenance, repair, and modification of aircraft and helicopters. This will enable them to acquire a larger share of the European and global market for civil and military aviation. For Defense, the preservation of technical knowledge and an improvement in the deployability of the Air Force fleet are particularly important. This is now being achieved thanks to in-house maintenance and modernization.
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