American Airlines said on Wednesday it had won a contract to do heavy maintenance on 29 Fokker F100 passenger jets for Latin American airline holding company Synergy Aerospace.

American Airlines Chief Executive Gerard Arpey told reporters during a press conference that the value of the deal was "in the tens of millions of dollars range, not in the hundreds."

The work will be done at American's Tulsa, Oklahoma, maintenance base, which the airline and local unions are trying to make into a profit center for the money-losing airline, aiming for USD$500 million in revenue gains and cost cuts by the end of 2006.

That runs counter to a general trend among US airlines of outsourcing heavy maintenance.

"At a time when JetBlue is sending their airplanes to El Salvador for maintenance, we've got a Latin American carrier sending their airplanes to Tulsa," Arpey said.

Synergy is the parent company of Colombian airline Avianca.

The planes are now in the Mojave Desert after having previously been leased by American and later bought by Synergy as well as Brazil's Ocean Air and Peru's Wayra.

"This underscores the progress we are making with the Transport Workers' Union and the ability of American Airlines to be competitive on a world scale in maintenance and engineering services," Arpey said.