Wheels Up signs five-year Phenom 300 landing gear overhaul and exchange deal with Av8 Mro

Wheels Up (WUP), based at Teterboro, has signed a five-year agreement with Av8 Mro for landing gear overhaul and exchange support covering its Phenom 300 fleet. Av8 Mro is a subsidiary of Victor Sierra Aviation Holdings.

The agreement provides flat-rate pricing and access to Av8's landing gear exchange pool. Under that arrangement, aircraft can return to service without waiting for individual components to go through overhaul.

The deal follows Wheels Up's expansion of its Phenom 300-series fleet after it completed its fleet modernisation programme in April 2026. Under that programme the operator replaced its legacy jet types.

Landing gear is a component where overhaul turnaround can keep an aircraft on the ground for an extended period. An exchange pool changes that arithmetic: the operator receives a serviceable unit and the removed one is overhauled separately, so the aircraft's downtime depends on the swap rather than on shop turnaround. Flat-rate pricing adds cost certainty on top of that, which matters to an operator running a large number of aircraft of one type on a utilisation-driven business model.

The arrangement also illustrates how a single-type fleet changes maintenance purchasing. When the fleet is concentrated on one family, component support can be contracted as a long-term programme with one provider instead of being bought event by event. The five-year term fits that logic and ties the provider's pool depth directly to the operator's dispatch reliability.

The point that will show whether the arrangement works is exchange availability when Phenom 300 gear removals cluster. Pool depth, not the price schedule, determines whether the promised return to service without waiting actually holds in practice.