Sonaca Group

Sonaca was created on 10 April 1978 out of the wreckage of Belgium's earlier national aircraft venture, and it built its business on one hard problem: the movable parts at the front and back of a wing. Slats, flaps, ailerons, fixed leading edges and the mechanisms and de-icing systems that go with them are still the heart of the company. Headquarters remain at Gosselies near Charleroi, and the Walloon regional investment company SRIW holds the large majority of the shares alongside the federal SFPI. The group has grown well beyond Belgium through LMI Aerospace in the United States, Sonaca Montreal in Canada, Sonaca Brasil, Sinelson in China, Sonaca Space and the light aircraft arm Sonaca Aircraft. Then came the biggest change in its history. On 3 October 2025 Sonaca closed a deal taking 51 percent of Aciturri's aerostructures activities, bringing the combined group above 6,700 people in seven countries with revenue past 1.2 billion euros and a backlog stretching roughly eight years.

The commercial and business jet line is the volume work, covering the Airbus A320, A330, A350 and A400M, Boeing 737 and 777, and programmes for Embraer, Bombardier, Dassault, Gulfstream, Honda Aircraft, Mitsubishi and Pilatus. Aciturri brought composite horizontal stabilisers, vertical tail planes and fuselage sections, which sit alongside Sonaca's metallic machining, sheet metal forming, hydroforming and chemical processing. Capability now runs from small-bed to large-bed and hard-metal machining, hand lay-up and automated composites, resin transfer moulding, assembly, systems integration and design engineering. Sites are spread across Belgium, Spain, Romania, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, China and the United States, and the enlarged group carries an order book worth close to ten billion dollars with visibility running about eight years out, which is the kind of position that lets a supplier invest ahead of demand instead of chasing it.

Defense is a separate line rather than a spillover. Sonaca produces structures for military platforms, maintains fighter aircraft and unmanned systems, and runs pilot training, with F-16 fuselage and structural work as the long-running Belgian thread and final assembly of F-35 horizontal tails as the newer one. Space delivers structural and thermal subsystems to institutional and commercial customers, from satellite flight structures to instrument mountings. Services cover the aftermarket, and a dedicated innovation line runs research and technology work aimed at new products, processes and business lines rather than immediate orders. Sonaca Aircraft sits slightly apart, having produced the Sonaca 200, a two-seat trainer that was the first aircraft designed and built in Belgium since 1961. It is a small programme against a group of this size, and it exists mostly because the engineering culture at Gosselies wanted to prove it could still take a whole aircraft from a blank sheet to a type certificate.