22 October 1968, São José dos Campos, São Paulo. On a runway carved out of the Paraíba Valley, a small, stubby twin-turboprop with a painted Brazilian flag on its tail starts its engines. It has no factory behind it, no company, no customers. About three hundred engineers and technicians from a military research centre have spent roughly two years hand-building it, and many of them are standing on the grass, watching. The aircraft is called the IPD-6504. In a few months it will get a better name, Bandeirante, after the colonial pioneers who pushed into Brazil’s interior. It lifts off, circles, and lands safely.
That flight is the founding myth of Embraer, the company that would go on to sell jets to American Airlines, the US Air Force and the Royal Netherlands Air Force. It is a strange story. In 1968 Brazil was a mostly agricultural country whose industry, as one official history of the period puts it, could barely make bicycles. Today its planemaker is generally ranked third in the world for commercial aircraft, behind only Boeing and Airbus. How did that happen?
The Ghost of Santos-Dumont
Brazilians will tell you their country has aviation in its blood, and they have a point. On 23 October 1906, in the Bagatelle gardens in Paris, the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his 14-bis about 60 metres under its own power, in front of witnesses and officials of the Aéro Club de France. In Brazil, that flight, not the Wright brothers’ quieter tests at Kitty Hawk three years earlier, is taught as the first true airplane flight. October 23 is still celebrated as Aviator’s Day.
But Santos-Dumont did his flying in France, with French engines and French workshops. For the next four decades Brazil flew other people’s aircraft. The future founder of Embraer, Ozires Silva, born in Bauru in 1931, later recalled wondering as a boy why his local aero club had only foreign planes despite the “genuinely Brazilian legacy” of Santos-Dumont. Pride, it turned out, was not an industry.
An MIT Professor and a Colonel’s Dream
The industry began with a school. In the 1940s an Air Force officer, Casimiro Montenegro Filho, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wright Field in the United States and came home convinced that Brazil needed its own version. In 1945 the Ministry of Aeronautics brought over Richard H. Smith, the head of MIT’s aeronautical engineering department. His blueprint, officially the “Plan for the Creation of the Aeronautical Technical Centre” but known to everyone as the Plano Smith, proposed not just a university but a whole ecosystem: a top engineering school, research institutes and, eventually, an aircraft industry around them. Smith gave a lecture in Rio in September 1945 with a title that sounded like science fiction at the time: “Brazil, future air power.”
The site chosen was São José dos Campos, a quiet town halfway between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, away from big-city distractions. Oscar Niemeyer, later the architect of Brasília, designed the campus. The Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) was formally created by decree on 16 January 1950. It admitted students through a national entrance exam, which was itself a novelty in Brazil: 250 candidates applied for the first class and 89 got in. Smith became ITA’s first rector. ITA was the first unit of the Centro Técnico de Aeronáutica (CTA), the military research complex that grew around it.
For nerds, here’s the key point. Brazil didn’t start by copying airplanes. It started by producing aeronautical engineers, and it waited roughly twenty years for them to become numerous and experienced enough to design something.
Ozires Silva and the Plane Nobody Wanted to Build
Ozires Silva was one of those engineers. He was a military pilot who had flown transport routes in the Amazon. He enrolled at ITA in 1959 and graduated in 1962 at the age of 31. At the CTA he led the aircraft department of the research institute, and in 1965 the team began designing a small twin-turboprop for 9 to 16 passengers. Brazil is enormous, and most of its towns had short, poor runways that jets couldn’t use. The plane was the IPD-6504, the future Bandeirante.
After the October 1968 first flight, Silva tried to convince private Brazilian companies to build the plane in series. None would take the risk. Then came a lucky accident. In 1969 a storm closed the airport at Guaratinguetá, and President Artur da Costa e Silva’s aircraft had to make an unscheduled landing in São José dos Campos. The local dignitaries were waiting in the wrong city, so Ozires Silva received the president himself and used the chance to make his pitch for a state-backed aircraft company.
It worked. On 19 August 1969, Decree-Law 770 created the Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica, Embraer, as a mixed-capital company controlled by the government. Its first mission was to build 80 Bandeirantes. Ozires Silva was its first head. The company started operating in its own buildings in São José dos Campos on 2 January 1970, and alongside the Bandeirante it took on the Ipanema crop-duster, which is still in production today.
The Tucano: Teaching the World’s Pilots
The Bandeirante sold well at home and then abroad, including to US commuter airlines, and it gave Embraer something more valuable than revenue: credibility. The next breakthrough was military. The EMB-312 Tucano, a turboprop trainer that first flew in 1980, gave student pilots a cockpit layout similar to a jet’s at a fraction of the cost. It was exported widely, and Britain’s Royal Air Force chose a version licence-built by Short Brothers in Belfast. That was a remarkable endorsement for a company barely a decade old: a Brazilian design was training the pilots of the air force that had won the Battle of Britain.
Crisis and Privatization
The 1980s and early 1990s were brutal. Brazil went through debt crises and hyperinflation, defence budgets collapsed after the Cold War, and the ambitious CBA-123 Vector turboprop, developed with Argentina, found almost no buyers. Embraer was losing money, cutting staff and depending on the Treasury. The government put it on the list of its National Privatization Programme, and on 7 December 1994 Embraer was sold. The new controlling group was the Bozano investment bank together with two big pension funds, PREVI (Banco do Brasil’s employees’ fund) and SISTEL (the telecom workers’ fund). The government kept a “golden share” that gives it veto power over strategic decisions, which still matters today.
The ERJ-145: The Bet That Saved the Company
Privatized Embraer bet almost everything on one idea: a 50-seat regional jet. The ERJ-145 began as a jet-powered stretch of the EMB-120 Brasília turboprop. It kept the Brasília’s three-abreast cabin, added a swept wing and two rear-mounted Rolls-Royce AE 3007 engines, and was built with risk-sharing partners, including Spain’s Gamesa for the wings and Chile’s Enaer for the tail. It first flew on 11 August 1995 with only 18 firm orders, was certified in December 1996, and entered service with ExpressJet in April 1997.
The timing was perfect. US airlines were replacing noisy, slow turboprops on feeder routes with small jets that passengers liked better. More than 1,200 ERJ-family aircraft were built, including the shorter ERJ-135 and ERJ-140, the Legacy business jet and military surveillance versions. The company that had nearly gone bankrupt became one of Brazil’s largest exporters.
E-Jets and E2: The Sweet Spot Between Regional and Mainline
Embraer’s next move was bigger. Instead of stretching the ERJ again, it designed a clean-sheet family for 70 to about 120 seats with a “double-bubble” fuselage, four-abreast seating and no middle seat. The E170 first flew on 19 February 2002. One engineer remembered that “we were all crying on the tarmac.” The E175, E190 and E195 followed by the end of 2004.
The E175 became the workhorse of US regional flying, because American “scope clauses” in pilot contracts limit the size of jets that partner airlines can fly, and the E175 fits. By the end of 2025 its firm orders had passed 1,000, from carriers such as American Airlines, SkyWest and Republic.
The second generation, the E-Jet E2, was launched at the Paris Air Show in 2013. It has new Pratt & Whitney geared turbofans, new wings and fly-by-wire. The E190-E2 first flew on 23 May 2016, three months ahead of schedule, and entered service with Norway’s Widerøe on 24 April 2018. The larger E195-E2 has turned into a small narrowbody that competes directly with the smallest Airbus and Boeing models. At the end of 2025 the E195-E2 had 401 firm orders. Customers include Porter, SAS, LATAM and Avelo.
Super Tucano and KC-390: Embraer Goes to War (Carefully)
Defence remains Embraer’s second pillar. The A-29 Super Tucano, a heavily upgraded Tucano that first flew in 1999, is a rugged, armoured turboprop for training, border patrol and light attack. It has become one of the world’s most widely exported combat aircraft of its class, flown by air forces from Colombia and Indonesia to Nigeria and Portugal, and even bought through US programmes for Afghanistan and Lebanon.
The bigger ambition is the KC-390 Millennium, the largest aircraft ever built in Brazil. It’s a twin-jet military transport and air-refuelling tanker that first flew on 3 February 2015 and aims at the market dominated for 70 years by Lockheed’s C-130 Hercules. Since then it has been chosen by a list of NATO and European air forces, including Portugal, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Czechia, Sweden and Slovakia, as well as South Korea. In a year when Europe is rearming, a Brazilian aircraft has become a quiet NATO success story.
The Boeing Marriage That Never Happened
In 2018 Embraer agreed to something that would have ended its independence. Boeing, reacting to Airbus’s takeover of Bombardier’s C Series jet, agreed to buy 80% of Embraer’s commercial aviation business through a joint venture, for US$4.2 billion. Brazil’s government approved it, and so did every regulator except the European Commission, which was still reviewing it. Embraer spent more than two years and enormous sums separating the commercial division from the rest of the company.
Then, on 25 April 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 crash and the 737 MAX grounding, Boeing walked away. It said Embraer had failed to meet closing conditions. Embraer said Boeing had “manufactured false claims” to escape a deal it could no longer afford. The matter went to arbitration, which ended in September 2024 with Boeing agreeing to pay Embraer US$150 million. In hindsight, the failed deal may have been the best thing that happened to Embraer. It kept its engineers, its brand and its whole aircraft lineup at the moment its rivals’ troubles opened the market.
Eve: Flying Cars From the Valley of Planes
Embraer’s newest bet is Eve Air Mobility, a separately listed spin-off developing an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, a kind of quiet air taxi for crowded cities like São Paulo, which already has one of the world’s largest helicopter fleets. Eve’s full-scale prototype made its first flight in December 2025. It claims a pre-order book of thousands of aircraft, but these are mostly non-binding letters of intent, and certification and real demand are still open questions. The whole eVTOL industry is still trying to prove it is a business and not just a beautiful render.
By the Numbers: Embraer Today
Embraer closed 2025 with its best year ever:
- Revenue: US$7.58 billion, up 18%, an all-time record.
- Deliveries: 244 aircraft, made up of 78 commercial jets, 155 executive jets (its Phenom and Praetor business jets are best-sellers), 3 KC-390s and 8 Super Tucanos.
- Firm-order backlog: a record US$31.6 billion.
- Employees: about 21,100.
It is commonly described as the world’s third-largest maker of commercial jets, after Boeing and Airbus, and the leader in airliners of up to about 150 seats. Revenue is still a fraction of Boeing’s or Airbus’s, but no other country outside the US, Europe and (now) China builds jet airliners that sell in volume worldwide.
Lessons From São José dos Campos
The secret of Embraer is not cheap labour or a single genius. It is a long chain of patient decisions. First came a school, ITA, built two decades before there was any industry to employ its graduates. Then came a niche the giants ignored: small planes for short runways, then 50-seat jets, then 100-seat jets. The company was privatized in time to survive. And again and again it focused on what airlines and air forces would actually buy, rather than on prestige.
Santos-Dumont gave Brazil a legend. ITA gave it engineers. Embraer turned both into one of the most unlikely industrial success stories of the 20th century, one that still starts, every working day, in a quiet valley between Rio and São Paulo.
Sources and Further Reading
- ITA, “Informações Gerais”, “A construção”, “A concepção”: https://www.ita.br/info ; http://www.ita.br/aconstruo
- FAB/INCAER, Opúsculo ITA (Plano Smith): https://www2.fab.mil.br/incaer/images/eventgallery/instituto/Opusculos/Textos/opusculo_ita.pdf
- AIAA, Ozires Silva biography: https://www.aiaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/ozires-silva-bio.pdf
- Câmara dos Deputados, EMBRAER (founding and privatization dates): https://www2.camara.leg.br/atividade-legislativa/comissoes/comissoes-mistas/cpcms/siglas/embraer.html
- Embraer bylaws (Decree-Law 770; privatization): https://ri.embraer.com.br/governanca/estatuto-social/
- ICAO, early aviation in Europe (14-bis): https://www.icao.int/sites/default/files/postalhistory/aviation_history_early_developments_in_europe.htm
- Embraer ERJ family and E-Jet E2 (Wikipedia, with primary references): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_ERJ_family ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2
- Key.aero, “Embraer’s 20 years of continued success with the E-Jet”: https://www.key.aero/article/embraers-20-years-continued-success-e-jet
- Boeing press release, 25 April 2020: https://investors.boeing.com/investors/news/press-release-details/2020/Boeing-Terminates-Agreement-to-Establish-Joint-Ventures-with-Embraer/default.aspx
- Embraer material fact (SEC 6-K), September 2024 arbitration: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1355444/000129281424003476/erj20240916_6k.htm
- Embraer 4Q25 earnings release: https://embraer.com/media/4i2hiv1w/release_earnings_4q25_eng.pdf
- KC-390 first flight (PR Newswire): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/embraer-kc-390-military-transport-makes-successful-first-flight-300029965.html
- Eve Air Mobility, first flight of full-scale prototype: https://ir.eveairmobility.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/93/eve-air-mobility-completes-successful-first-flight-of
- Bloomberg, “How Brazil Made Embraer a Top Airplane Maker” (2024): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-04/how-brazil-made-embraer-a-top-airplane-maker
