1915–1941: Kirk, the Military Aviation School and the merger

The Brazilian Army was the first Brazilian service to fly in war. Lieutenant Ricardo Kirk, who earned his brevet in France in 1912, flew reconnaissance for the army in the Contestado War and was killed in a crash on 1 March 1915; he is today the patron of Army Aviation. In 1919 the army created the Military Aviation School at Campo dos Afonsos in Rio de Janeiro to train aviators, observers and mechanics, and in 1927 aviation became a branch of the army. It was used on a large scale for the first time in the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, flying for the federal government against São Paulo. By 1941 it had 330 aircraft, according to English Wikipedia, many obsolete or unserviceable. That year the government created the Brazilian Air Force, which absorbed army and naval aviation, and the army was left without aircraft for 45 years.

1986: the Falklands lesson and the return of army aviation

What brought it back, Wikipedia says, was the Falklands War of 1982, which showed Brazil’s gaps in helicopter mobility. The army’s Ground Force 90 plan of 1986–1990 included helicopters, and President José Sarney, who needed the support of the army minister, Leônidas Pires Gonçalves, provided the money. Army Aviation was formally re-created on 3 September 1986, ending the air force’s monopoly on military aircraft — a sore point that resurfaced in 2020. The army bought 36 HM-1 Pantera (AS365K) and 16 HA-1 Esquilo helicopters, then 20 Fennecs also designated HA-1, all from Aérospatiale, which already had a Brazilian factory, Helibras. The first helicopter was delivered on 21 April 1989, and the army has been Helibras’s largest rotary-wing customer ever since.

Panteras, Fennecs and the move to Taubaté

The Aviation Command was first set up in Brasília in 1989 and moved to Taubaté, in São Paulo state between Rio and São Paulo, in 1991. Taubaté is still the centre of gravity: the command, the 1st and 2nd Army Aviation Battalions, the training centre, the maintenance battalion and the airfield are all there, and Wikipedia records that about 76 per cent of its people were still in Taubaté in 2018. Four UH-60L Black Hawks (HM-2) and eight AS532 Cougars (HM-3) arrived in the late 1990s, and from 2011 sixteen EC725 (H225M) Jaguars (HM-4), assembled by Helibras under the 50-helicopter HX-BR programme. Modernisation contracts for the Pantera and the Fennec were signed in 2009 and 2010; when they ended in 2021 the helicopters became the HM-1A Super Pantera and the HA-1A.

From the Traíra river to the Amazon garrisons

The new arm’s baptism of fire was Operation Traíra in 1991, the army’s response, coordinated with Colombia, to a FARC attack on a border detachment that killed three Brazilian soldiers; HA-1s and HM-1s flew with the air force’s helicopters and Tucanos. Some of the helicopters stayed in the north and formed the Amazônia detachment at Manaus in 1992, the root of today’s 4th Battalion. In 1997 four helicopters flew with the Military Observer Mission Ecuador–Peru (MOMEP), the arm’s first international mission. The 3rd Battalion moved gradually from Taubaté to Campo Grande from 2009, and in 2022 two Jaguars formed a detachment at Belém. At home the arm flew in the federal intervention in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, the São Paulo floods and the Yanomami humanitarian crisis of 2023.

2020–2026: the Sherpa row, Black Hawks and the H145M

The arm still cannot fly fixed-wing aircraft. A presidential decree of 2 June 2020, No. 10,386, allowed the army to operate aeroplanes, for a planned purchase of C-23 Sherpas; the former air force commander Lt Brig Nivaldo Rossato wrote that funding army crews was an affront (“um acinte”) while dozens of air force aircraft stood idle for lack of money, and the decree was revoked two days later. Helicopters were another matter. In 2023 the army decided to replace its HM-2s and HM-3s with 12 new Black Hawks; on 24 May 2024 the US approved the sale of 12 UH-60Ms, valued at $950 million in all, of which about $450 million was for the aircraft and engines. The first arrived in late November 2025 aboard a C-17 and was presented at Taubaté on 15 December 2025. Twelve Helibras-built H145Ms are planned from 2028.

What works, and what is still missing

The re-created arm has done what it was built for. It gave the army its own air mobility, built a training and maintenance base at Taubaté and pushed helicopters into the Amazon, where distances make them indispensable. Its fleet of about 95 aircraft in 2022 is modest for an army of Brazil’s size, though, and more than two-thirds of it is light Fennecs and Panteras of 1980s design; the Cougars and the first Black Hawks date from the 1990s. The army’s plan for 12 attack helicopters by 2031, set in 2017, had produced no order in the sources checked. The arm’s loss record is only partly published: Wikipedia mentions two HM-1s and two HA-1s recovered after crashes and two further HA-1s not recovered, without dates or casualties.

Current fleet and orders

Airbus Helicopters, Sikorsky, Aérospatiale, Helibras, XMobots