Héroux-Devtek Inc.

Héroux-Devtek is the third largest landing gear company in the world, and it spent the last decade shedding almost everything that was not landing gear to get there. The Longueuil, Quebec business designs, develops, qualifies, builds and overhauls complete gear systems, main and nose, together with the actuation systems, struts, side braces, uplocks and ball screws that go with them. It also still manufactures hydraulic systems, fluid filtration systems and electronic enclosures. Roughly 1,960 people work across eighteen plants in North America and Europe. The customer base splits between civil and military aerospace, and the company sells complete systems, subassemblies or individual machined details depending on what a program needs.

The military side is the deeper of the two markets. Héroux-Devtek designed and developed the landing gear for the Sikorsky CH-53K King Stallion, the heaviest helicopter the United States Marine Corps operates, and it holds a Boeing licence covering H-47 Chinook gear along with new-build Chinook units. In 2018 it won a Boeing award worth around C$200 million over ten years for the main landing gear and side braces on the F/A-18 Super Hornet and the EA-18G Growler. It supplies landing gear door uplocks into the F-35 Lightning II supply chain. Aftermarket military work includes a long-running United States Air Force landing gear repair and overhaul contract and a remanufacturing arrangement signed with AAR. The heritage piece the company still trades on is older than any of that. The legs that set Eagle down on the Sea of Tranquility in 1969 came from a Héroux predecessor plant.

On the commercial side the pivotal event was Boeing's 2013 decision to hand Héroux-Devtek the complete 777 and 777X landing gear package, main gear, nose gear and the nose gear drag strut, which produced what was then the tallest landing gear assembly in production and moved a component supplier into the front rank of system integrators. Business and regional aircraft work includes the Embraer Legacy 450 and 500. Landing gear is an unusually concentrated market. Three firms supply most of the world's large aircraft gear, tooling and qualification costs are punishing, and awards run for decades, which is why one Boeing decision could reshape a mid-sized Quebec manufacturer. Aftermarket activity is a deliberate hedge against program cycles and covers spares provisioning and supply, warranty administration, technical publications, on-site technical support, training, and overhaul of gear for aircraft that stopped rolling off the line decades ago. Certification testing, drop testing and structural qualification are done in house rather than subcontracted, which is part of why the company can bid whole systems rather than parts. Héroux-Devtek traded publicly in Toronto for almost forty years under the roots of a business founded in 1942 as Héroux Machine Parts. That ended in February 2025, when Platinum Equity closed a C$1.35 billion take-private at C$32.50 a share. The head office stayed in Longueuil under the terms of the deal.