At 7:07 on the morning of 22 October 1968, a small twin-turboprop painted in Brazilian Air Force colours rolled out of hangar X10 at the Aerospace Technical Center in São José dos Campos and took off from an unpaved runway. Major José Mariotto Ferreira and flight engineer Michel Cury brought it back 50 minutes later. The witnesses raised their arms in celebration.

The aircraft had no manufacturer. There was no company to build it, no investors willing to try, and no proof that Brazil could sell an airliner to anyone. Within a year, that prototype had created one. The company was Embraer, and the aircraft was the Bandeirante.

A plane for the towns the airlines forgot

By the 1960s, Brazil’s airlines had moved to bigger aircraft and were abandoning the small towns of the interior. According to Jeffrey Rodengen’s The History of Embraer, airlines served just 45 Brazilian communities in the 1960s, compared with 360 a decade earlier. In 1965 the Ministry of Aeronautics called for a reliable, cheap-to-run turboprop transport that could serve the country’s small, rough airfields.

The work went to the Research and Development Institute (IPD) of the Aeronautical Technical Center (CTA) under the project number IPD-6504. The lead designer was the French engineer Max Holste. Leading the project for the CTA was Ozires Silva, a former Brazilian Air Force pilot who had flown amphibians over the Amazon and graduated as an aeronautical engineer from the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA) in 1962.

Assembly of the prototype began in 1966 with money scraped from other projects and, as Embraer itself recalls, plenty of scepticism inside and outside the Air Force. The CTA’s director, Colonel Paulo Victor da Silva, gave it a better name than a project number: Bandeirante, after the 17th-century pioneers who pushed into Brazil’s interior.

22 October 1968

Getting to that first flight took three years and four months from the first preliminary studies. The team logged 110,000 project hours, 12,000 manufacturing drawings, 22,000 hours of structural and aerodynamic calculations and some 282,000 hours of manufacturing and tooling. The prototype was presented to officials and the press four days after its first flight, on 26 October, which is why some references give that later date.

The first machines, later called EMB 100 and given the military designation YC-95, were modest: eight seats, round cabin windows and two Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-20 turboprops. A second prototype flew in October 1969 and a third in 1970. Everyone agreed they flew well. The question was who would build them.

Embraer’s own short film on the EMB 100 Bandeirante, released for the 50th anniversary of its first flight.

The fog that founded Embraer

No private investor would bet on a Brazilian aircraft industry. Then, on a Sunday in 1969, fog closed the airport at nearby Guaratinguetá. The aircraft carrying President Arthur da Costa e Silva diverted to São José dos Campos and stopped in front of the Bandeirante hangar, while the local dignitaries were waiting for him at the wrong airport. Ozires Silva was sent to receive him.

Silva showed the president the aircraft and pitched a mixed-economy company to build it. On 19 August 1969, Decree 770 created Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica, Embraer, with Silva as its first managing director and an initial order for 80 Bandeirantes for the Brazilian Air Force. The new company began work in its own facilities in São José dos Campos in January 1970.

By then the market had moved on from eight seats. Embraer redesigned the aircraft into the EMB 110: a longer fuselage, square windows, enclosed main wheels, a new windscreen and 680 shp PT6A-27 engines. The Brazilian Air Force, which called it the C-95, received the first one on 9 February 1973. Transbrasil took the first airline Bandeirante two months later.

Brazil’s first export airliner

Der Uruguayan Air Force became the first export customer in 1975. Two years later the French commuter airline Air Littoral became the first foreign airline to order it, and in May 1977 its Bandeirante crossed the Atlantic, via Fernando de Noronha, Dakar and Seville, to appear at Embraer’s first Paris Air Show. French, British and US certification followed between December 1977 and August 1978.

The timing was perfect. In 1978 the US authorities eased the rules for small aircraft on regional routes, just as American commuter airlines were hunting for something cheap and tough. Embraer opened a US subsidiary in Fort Lauderdale in 1979. The stretched EMB 110P1 and P2, with 18 or more seats and 750 shp PT6A-34 engines, became the definitive versions.

Bandeirantes flew for Air Ecosse and Air Wales in Britain, Brit Air and Kar-Air in Europe, commuter carriers across the United States and operators in Australia and the Pacific. The military bought them too, as transports, survey aircraft, search-and-rescue platforms and as the EMB 111 maritime patrol version, which the Brazilian Air Force called the P-95 Bandeirulha.

Ryanair’s first aircraft

One of the type’s most famous jobs came in Ireland. On 8 July 1985, a 15-seat Brazilian-built Bandeirante flew from Waterford to London Gatwick on the first ever Ryanair flight. The airline that would become Europe’s largest started life with a Brazilian commuter turboprop and kept flying the type until the end of the 1980s.

Over two decades Embraer delivered 498 Bandeirantes to customers in 36 countries before production ended around 1990. Its successor was already flying: the pressurised, 30-seat EMB 120 Brasilia, which took the same formula further. From there Embraer went on to the ERJ regional jets, the E-Jets, the EMB-312 Tucano trainer and today’s C-390 Millennium.

Embraer marks 50 years of Bandeirante operations, counted from its Brazilian Air Force service entry on 9 February 1973 (in Portuguese).

Still working

Fifty years after that first flight, in October 2018, Embraer counted about 150 Bandeirantes still flying with airlines, air taxis, government agencies and air forces in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. In Guatemala, TAG Airlines has kept them in regular service into the 2020s.

When Embraer celebrated the anniversary, it restaged the 1968 ceremony in São José dos Campos, and Ozires Silva was there to watch. The little turboprop built for forgotten airstrips had done more than reconnect Brazil’s interior. It had built the country an aircraft industry.

A TAG Airlines EMB 110 taking off from La Aurora airport in Guatemala City, the turboprop soundtrack of a type that is still working.

Sources: Embraer (Ozires Silva history; 50th anniversary release, October 2018), AVweb, Washington Aviation Historical Society (Robert G. Waldvogel, citing Jeffrey L. Rodengen, The History of Embraer), GlobalSecurity.org, Waterford News & Star, AIN

Header photo: Ken Fielding / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0