Magnaghi Aerospace (MAGROUP)

Magnaghi Aerospace trades as MAGROUP and is the operating parent of a cluster of aerospace companies gathered around one specialism: getting aircraft onto and off the ground. Magnaghi Aeronautica in Naples is the founding business and has been designing and building landing gear and hydraulic components for more than eighty five years, with over twenty thousand systems delivered across more than seven thousand aircraft. Invesco took control in 2001 and the group has grown by acquisition since, buying the US landing gear specialist HSM-Blair in 2018 with backing from The Three Hills. The group now runs seven industrial sites in Italy, Brazil and the United States and employs around eight hundred people. The individual companies are worth naming because each covers a different part of the value chain. Salver in Brindisi builds aerospace structures from high performance composites. Metal Sud in Caserta does surface treatments and special processes that protect aeronautical components. Magnaghi Aeronautica do Brasil sits in Sao Jose dos Campos next to the Brazilian airframers. Blair-HSM makes landing systems and complex aerospace parts in the United States, and Air Marine and Airlift Hydraulics handle landing gear maintenance, repair and overhaul.

The defence work is mostly Italian and mostly structural. Magnaghi is the tier one supplier of main and nose landing gear on the Leonardo C-27J Spartan tactical transport, a programme it entered in 1997, and it supplies into the M-346 advanced jet trainer, which it picked up in 2002. Regional aircraft work followed with the ATR 42 and ATR 72 family from 2010, where the company sits under other tier one suppliers rather than holding the contract directly. Rotary wing is the newer direction. The group was named in 2022 as the supplier designing, developing, qualifying and producing the complete landing gear system for Defiant X, the Sikorsky and Boeing compound helicopter offered as a Black Hawk replacement, with the Italian and American landing gear centres working the programme jointly and manufacture set for Medford, New York.

Commercial and new build programmes keep the order book from depending on one customer. Radia signed MAGROUP in 2025 to develop the landing system for WindRunner, the outsized cargo aircraft being designed to carry wind turbine blades, and Radia's announcement leaned on the group's record of qualification and long term product support rather than on a single design. Salver's composite work covers wing and fuselage structures for airframers who want the part finished rather than the laminate delivered. Metal Sud matters more than its size suggests, because anodising, painting, plating and non destructive inspection are the processes that decide whether a landing gear leg lasts a service life. Aftermarket support runs alongside all of it, and for an operator that is often the whole relationship.