Washington: Brazil’s Embraer is hunting for new A-29 Super Tucano orders to keep its American final assembly line humming, with 2025 seen as a critical year to parry back a production gap, its defence CEO said.
Embraer stood up an A-29 final assembly line in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2013 to produce the turboprop plane for the US military and Foreign Military Sales (FMS) customers, most prominently for Afghan air force pilots trained by US troops. But with US involvement in Afghanistan at an end, production at the facility has slowed to its “minimal pace,” said Bosco da Costa Jr. in a recent interview.
“We are running the facility without big orders coming from FMS,” said da Costa. “We are facing a gap of production there. We are still fighting for some orders coming from FMS case[s] and even — why not — from the US government.”
The Jacksonville factory is tooled to produce about 24 Super Tucanos per year, da Costa said, but the company currently only has four A-29s in various stages of production. A Embraer spokesperson said those planes are “allocated to current and near-term customers,” but declined to name what countries had ordered them.
Jacksonville could face an uphill battle for orders due to its unique setup. Most orders for the Embraer plane, also known as the EMB 314 Super Tucano, run through the company’s Brazil-based production plant.
But the A-29 variant produced in the United States is assembled by Embraer in Florida, before US prime contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. outfits the baseline aircraft with US-specific mission systems and communications gear in Colorado. That production line caters only to US customers or Foreign Military Sales brokered by the Pentagon, a much slimmer portion of the Super Tucano customer base.
That means that while Embraer has garnered new Super Tucano orders this year from countries such as Paraguay and Uruguay, those contracts cannot be used to pad out a lapse of orders for Jacksonville.
