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.
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