FAdeA - Fabrica Argentina de Aviones

FAdeA is Argentina's aircraft factory, and it has been in Cordoba since 1927, when it opened as the Instituto Aerotecnico and became the first aircraft plant in Latin America. It has been through several owners. The Air Force ran it as the Fabrica Militar de Aviones, Lockheed Martin operated it under concession from 1995, and the state took it back in 2009 as a company under the Ministry of Defence, holding almost all of the shares. Roughly 950 people work there. Four service lines organise the business: manufacturing, military maintenance and overhaul, commercial maintenance and overhaul, and engineering, with training and integrated logistic support wrapped around them.

The aircraft programmes are the reason the plant exists. The IA-63 Pampa III is the current production trainer and light attack jet, now offered in a Bloque II standard with a glass cockpit and updated avionics, and it is the aircraft Argentine pilots move to before combat types. The IA-100, a piston elemental trainer built largely from composites, has been through a redesign into an IA-100B variant. Older than either is the IA-58 Pucara, the twin turboprop counter insurgency aircraft FAdeA designed in the 1960s, which is being reworked into the Pucara Fenix with Pratt & Whitney PT6A-62 engines in place of the original Astazous, four blade Hartzell propellers and a mission fit oriented toward surveillance and airspace control. Contracts covering Pampa III, Pucara Fenix and IA-100B worth around forty eight million dollars were regularised with the Defence Ministry in May 2026 after two years in limbo.

Maintenance is the steadier half of the workload. FAdeA overhauls the Argentine Air Force fleet, and it built the national capacity to carry out deep structural and systems work on the C-130 Hercules rather than send airframes abroad. On the civil side it holds approvals to work on Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 airliners, and it has extended into executive aircraft maintenance through a partnership with Altaviacion. Parachute manufacture for military and sport users runs as a separate product line.

Manufacturing for others rounds out the picture. FAdeA produces structural components for Embraer's C-390 Millennium under an agreement that gave Argentina a share of the programme, and the same shop floor supplies precision aerostructures, tooling and machined parts. Engineering sells design and certification work, and the training arm prepares technical and operational personnel. Funding remains the persistent constraint. Wage arrears and cash shortages stalled the plant during 2026, and its ability to hold the strategic programmes together has been openly questioned in the Argentine press. Cordoba matters here beyond the factory gate. The plant anchors an aeronautical cluster that trained most of Argentina's aerospace engineers, and successive governments have cited that industrial base, rather than the order book, as the reason to keep FAdeA in state hands. Privatisation has been debated repeatedly and repeatedly shelved.