Aerostar S.A.

Aerostar has been building and fixing aircraft in Bacau since 1953, when it opened as a repair works for the Romanian air force. Privatisation in 2000 sold the state's 69.99 percent holding to a consortium of managers, employees and IAROM, with the government keeping a golden share over defence-related decisions, and the shares have traded on the Bucharest Stock Exchange under ARS since February 1998. IAROM remains the controlling shareholder. Three business lines are reported: manufacture of aeronautical products, civil aviation MRO, and defence systems. The mix is deliberate, because commercial subcontract work smooths out the lumpy rhythm of national defence budgets.

Aerostructures came first in commercial terms. The Bacau plant machines and assembles components, subassemblies, landing gear and hydraulic systems for Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, Dassault, Gulfstream, GKN Aerospace and Safran, along with ground support equipment, jigs and tooling. Civil MRO started in 2003 and now covers base and component maintenance on the Boeing 737 family including the MAX, and on the Airbus A320 family, with non-destructive testing, laboratory services, special processes and NDT training offered alongside. That training and qualification work is sold externally as well as used internally.

Defence is where the company's engineering reputation was made. Working with Elbit Systems of Israel, Aerostar rebuilt the Romanian air force MiG-21 fleet into the LanceR standard during the 1990s, fitting Western avionics, a new weapons management system and a helmet-mounted sight to a Soviet airframe, and the same partnership put modern avionics into the IAR-99 Soim advanced jet trainer. Those two programmes made Bacau the reference site for keeping mixed-origin fleets flying. Current military MRO covers Romanian F-16s, remaining MiG-21 airframes and C-130 Hercules transports, and in 2024 the company opened what Lockheed Martin describes as the first European maintenance centres for the S-70 Black Hawk helicopter and for the M142 HIMARS rocket launcher. Ground defence work runs in parallel. Aerostar led the LAROM programme that converted forty Romanian 122 mm APRA rocket launchers to a 160 mm Israeli-derived standard, and it has since shown a further modernised LAROM with EXTRA guided rockets that extends reach from around forty-five kilometres to roughly one hundred and fifty. The electronics business designs, builds and integrates communication and identification friend or foe systems onto ground, naval and air platforms, and the catalogue also runs to engineering equipment, self-propelled howitzers and armoured vehicle work. Licensed production of the Yakovlev Yak-52 trainer, more than 1,900 of them over the years, is the other thing Bacau is quietly famous for, and the plant has also turned out flying Focke-Wulf Fw 190 replicas for collectors. The company operates from two facilities in Bacau and sells the same non-destructive testing, laboratory, special process and qualification services to outside customers that it uses on its own lines. That habit of commercialising internal capability is a large part of why a state-founded repair works survived privatisation in reasonable health.