AERTEC Solutions

AERTEC is an engineering firm from Malaga that works on three things at once: airports, aircraft systems and guided weapons. Two aeronautical engineers, Antonio Gomez-Guillamon and Vicente Padilla, founded it in 1997. It is still privately held, has grown to several hundred staff, and keeps offices in the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and Abu Dhabi. For a company of this size the balance between civil and military work is unusual, and the three business areas share one engineering base rather than sitting in separate silos.

Aviation is the original business. AERTEC does aeronautical consultancy, airport master planning, infrastructure design, project management and operational support, and it sells software and technology for running terminals and airside systems. Advanced air mobility is the newest line inside that team, covering the ground infrastructure and airspace integration that electric aircraft and drone operations will need. The work is consultancy, design and supervision rather than construction, which is why the firm turns up on airport programmes far from Spain without ever pouring concrete.

Aerospace systems is the industrial half. AERTEC is a design and engineering supplier to Airbus and works on aircraft electrification, flight control systems, avionics and connected cabin equipment, alongside ground test equipment and factory-side industrial solutions for aerostructure production lines. That covers hardware and software developed to civil certification standards as well as the rigs airframers use on the shop floor to test what they have built.

Defence systems is the newest area and the most distinctive. The company has built a position in semi-active laser guidance and miniaturised electronics, and it now sells three related products from it. FOX is a laser-guided munition sized for Class I unmanned aircraft, small enough that a hand-launched drone can carry it. BAT is a semi-active laser guided glide munition. Seeker is the guidance kit sold on its own for integration into other people's weapons and platforms. Semi-active laser guidance means a separate designator marks the target while the munition steers toward the reflected spot, which keeps the seeker small and the round affordable enough to fit under a drone. Underneath all three sits a guidance, navigation and control line for unmanned systems and guided weapons. AERTEC also sells aircraft armament integration as a service, taking a store from feasibility study through electrical and data architecture, pylon and adaptor design with finite element and fatigue analysis, drag and flutter assessment, six degree of freedom safe separation modelling and instrumented flight testing, including the stores management system software that handles release logic and safety interlocks. Few European firms of any size cover that chain end to end, and it is the thread that ties the munitions work back to the same aeronautical engineering that plans runways.