Argentina bought five fighter jets from France, paid for them, and took delivery in May 2019. Seven years later, not one of them has flown a single operational sortie. On 20 August the Argentine Navy stopped pretending they ever would.

The aircraft were fine. The engines were fine. What Argentina could not get was a set of explosive cartridges roughly the size of a fist — the pyrotechnics that fire a pilot out of a Martin-Baker ejection seat. Martin-Baker is British. Britain has restricted military exports to Argentina since 1982, and that restriction reaches any hardware containing British-origin parts.

No cartridges, no ejection seat. No ejection seat, no airworthiness certificate. Five jets sat in storage at Comandante Espora until the Navy admitted defeat.

Four Decades, Two British Ships

The first five Super Étendards reached Argentina in 1981 and went to the Second Naval Fighter and Attack Squadron. A year later they were at war.

Carrying AM39 Exocet missiles, the squadron flew the strikes that hit the destroyer HMS Sheffield and the container ship Atlantic Conveyor in May 1982. Both ships were lost. For the Royal Navy it was the most painful lesson of the campaign; for Argentine naval aviation it became the founding legend.

By the 2010s the original aircraft had stopped flying altogether. Spares dried up, components went out of production, and the fleet quietly became a museum collection that still wore squadron markings.

The Fix That Almost Worked

The 2018 deal was supposed to solve everything. Five Super Étendard Modernisés, the upgraded French standard, for around 14 million euros including spares and a simulator. On paper it was the bargain of the decade.

Then the ejection-seat problem surfaced. Argentina tried a domestic workaround, with the firm MBA Argentina SA attempting to produce or recertify the cartridges locally, but the country’s Joint Military Airworthiness Directorate judged the ground tests unsatisfactory. France, for its part, no longer operates the type and could neither supply the British-origin parts nor sustain an aircraft it had retired itself.

The irony is hard to miss. In 2024 the Argentine Air Force successfully took delivery of ex-Danish F-16s — a deal that also required British sign-off on UK-made components, and got it. The Air Force cleared the hurdle. The Navy never did.

What Plan Dédalo Actually Buys

The retirement is one line in a bigger document. Plan Dédalo is a five-year restructuring of Argentine Naval Aviation, built on a study started in 2025 and signed off by the Navy’s General Staff. It reorganises bases, rewrites doctrine, and brings in new equipment: two P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft, Beechcraft B-360s replacing ageing B-200s, Leonardo AW-109 helicopters in place of AS-555 Fennecs, and Shield AI V-BAT drones.

Notice what is not on that list. There is no fighter, no strike aircraft, and no air-launched anti-ship missile. Retiring both Super Étendard versions at once leaves the Argentine Navy without a single fixed-wing combat aircraft and without the capability that made it famous in 1982. No replacement is currently planned.

A Quiet Ending

There was no flypast. The withdrawal will happen sometime this year, on a date the Navy has not set, and the Defence Ministry has not said what becomes of the airframes.

A type that once forced the Royal Navy to rethink how it defended a task force is being retired because nobody would sell Argentina the cartridges. Forty-four years after the Falklands, the embargo is still doing its job.

Argentine Super Étendards and the AM39 Exocet: the combination that defined the type’s reputation.

Sources: MercoPress, Zona Militar, Air Data News, Militarnyi, Defense Mirror.