With the traditional Boeing-Airbus foodfight dominating the news coverage of the biennial Paris Air Show, one of the stand-out companies that receives less attention than it deserves is Brazil’s Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica S.A., or Embraer, as it is more commonly known. Embraer jet and propeller-driven aircraft are in use all over the world, although many people do not realize they are flying on a Brazilian product. As a corporation it is the jewel in Brazil’s industrial crown, employing a workforce of 19,265 people, and enjoying a backlog of firm orders totaling $14.8 billion. Currently Embraer has the third largest yearly delivery of commercial aircraft (behind Boeing and Airbus) and the fourth largest workforce (behind Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier). One of the largest users of Embraer aircraft is the American carrier JetBlue. Embraer’s headquarters, main production facilities, and engineering/design offices are in São José dos Campos, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. (Embraer employees from São Paulo state are known as Paulistas. They tend to look down on the Cariocas from Rio de Janeiro–saying that they do not know how to work. Cariocas return the favour by accusing those from São Paulo state of being too “up tight.”) The company also manufactures major components and conducts flight testing at a production plant in Gavião Peixoto, São Paulo state. This facility has some of the most modern tooling available from Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Japan and includes a 16,400 foot runway. The company has an interesting history. It first started producing commercial planes in the early 1970s. “At the time,” said one Embraer executive, “a lot of people laughed at us or asked what the hell we were thinking about. They would say ‘how can they even think of trying to build aircraft in this third–maybe even fifth-world country’ and predicted we would never last.” But the Brazilan planemaker did last, surviving near-death in the economic crisis of the 1990s in Brazil, when they went down to about 3,000 employees. Today they are one of the best aerospace companies in the business, and their 190 model commuter airliner is only slightly smaller than–and just as popular as–the Boeing 737. Even less noticed is the company’s defense division, which at times has kept the Brazilian Air Force’s older model Northrop F-5s up to date and has designed a series of airborne early warning and surveillance platforms. Without Embraer’s product line the Brazilian Air Force would be unable to patrol and keep drug traffickers from slipping across into the Amazonia.
The Embraer Super Tucano.
Most interesting of all, this Brazilian powerhouse may be the key to the U.S. being able to gain the upper hand against the insurgency in Iraq. U.S. fighter aircraft makers produce primarily jets–too fast for the close-in fighting that counterinsurgency demands. Helicopters can get in low and fly slow, but they have limited range and cannot get up to speed to move from one spot on the battlefield to another. Embraer’s answer is the Super Tucano, a street-tough, two-seat propeller-driven fighter that looks like a cross between the World War II P-51 Mustang and the Douglas A-1 Skyraiders that were used as search-and-rescue “Sandies” in Vietnam to extract downed pilots. But unlike these aeroplanes of old the Super Tucano is stuffed full of the most modern displays and avionics. It can drop a precision-guided bomb down an air shaft as easily as one of the jet-propelled fast movers can, and it can datalink to any number of sensor platforms to be guided in to a target. It is Brazilian know-how at its best and most innovative.
Give all of this, it was no coincidence that the U.S. Air Force recently put out a Request for Information, asking for Embraer to respond. “If the USAF go forward with this request and move out in the time frame they have indicated, only the Super Tucano will have an aeroplane ready to carry out this vital mission,” said one of Embraer’s senior defense executives. Embraer may also be responsible rescuing a different category of Americans. For those desperate to escape U.S. commercial airline hell and Transportation Security Administration purgatory, the company has developed two new jet aircraft models, dubbed Phenom 100 and 300, seating four and nine passengers, respectively. They will operate from small suburban airports, allowing a businessman to fly from the Washington, D.C., area to Chicago without becoming a victim in the War Against Shampoo. Now that’s Brazilian know-how making a real difference.
