For 44 years the Frecce Tricolori have painted the Italian sky from the cockpit of a single-engined Aermacchi. Last week, at Leonardo’s plant at Venegono, near Varese, their successor rolled into daylight: the first M-346 built for Italy’s national aerobatic team, wearing the Pininfarina tricolour livery unveiled two years ago.

The roll-out took place on 16 October 2026, according to Coccarde Tricolori, and photos taken by local spotter Jacopo Castelli began circulating the next day. The jet still lacks its formation number and the Frecce Tricolori tail markings, but there is no mistaking it. The Frecce Tricolori M-346 has gone from a promise at a 2024 ceremony to hardware on a factory apron.

It will replace the MB-339A/PAN, which the 313° Gruppo Addestramento Acrobatico at Rivolto has flown since 1982.

Fifteen jets, a 2028 debut

Italy plans to buy 15 M-346s for the team. Coccarde Tricolori reports that Parliament cleared the acquisition in October 2024, and the figure matches a defence planning document, cited by The Aviationist, that foresaw 20 additional M-346s, 15 of them for the Frecce.

Production is under way at Venegono. Deliveries are expected to begin in 2027, which should make 2027 the last full display season of the MB-339PAN. The first full season on the Frecce Tricolori M-346 is pencilled in for 2028 — provided deliveries and pilot conversion keep pace, as Hangar Italy cautions. Delivery and public debut are two different milestones.

Converting a ten-ship display team is no paper exercise. The Frecce fly nine aircraft in close formation plus a solo, and every manoeuvre has been honed on the MB-339’s handling for four decades.

From Istrana promise to Venegono roll-out

The choice was announced on 12 September 2024 at Istrana air base, as the team returned from its North America tour. Defence minister Guido Crosetto and Air Force chief General Luca Goretti presented an M-346 in the new livery, which the Aeronautica Militare said develops the theme of the “renaissance of the tricolour”.

The decision overturned an earlier plan to give the team the single-engined M-345, a lighter and cheaper trainer. The M-346 costs more to fly and maintain, but its performance is better suited to large formation aerobatics, European Security & Defence noted at the time.

The aircraft shown at Istrana was an existing Air Force T-346A painted for the occasion, flight.com.gr points out. The jet now standing at Venegono is the first one actually built for the team, as part of a wider T-346A buy for the Aeronautica Militare.

Leonardo did not hide its satisfaction.

Two engines, a different kind of display

The M-346 is a very different animal from the aircraft it replaces. Where the MB-339 has one engine, the Master has two Honeywell F124-GA-200 turbofans of 28 kN (6,300 lbf) each, a fly-by-wire flight control system with quadruple redundancy, and a maximum speed of 1,090 km/h (680 mph). Its first prototype flew on 15 July 2004.

Designed as an advanced jet trainer, the T-346A already prepares Italian and foreign pilots for front-line fighters, notably at the International Flight Training School at Decimomannu, Sardinia, run jointly by Leonardo and the Air Force. With two engines where its predecessor had one, the Frecce Tricolori M-346 promises a display with more energy in every vertical figure.

Industry sources quoted by Il Sole 24 Ore in 2024 gave a blunter reason for the change: the MB-339s have long been out of production, and spare parts were becoming hard to find. The same sources warned that, without a new aircraft, the formation would soon have to shrink from ten jets to nine.

The Frecce also gain a jet with a large international family. The M-346, which shares its origins with the Russian Yak-130 from an Aermacchi–Yakovlev partnership that ended in 2000, had sold 126 examples worldwide and logged more than 125,000 flight hours by Leonardo’s 2024 count. That brings an established support, simulator and training network with it.

Aeronautica Militare: the M-346 will be the future aircraft of the Frecce Tricolori, September 2024.

The Aermacchi line comes full circle

There is a pleasing continuity here. The MB-339, which first flew in 1976, was conceived to succeed the Aermacchi MB-326, the jet trainer that schooled a generation of Italian pilots. All three are Aermacchi designs from Varese. The team itself, founded on 1 March 1961, flew the F-86E Sabre y el Fiat G.91 PAN before the MB-339.

Seven decades of Aermacchi trainers, three generations, one family. When the first Frecce Tricolori M-346 trails green, white and red smoke over Rivolto, it will be a new aircraft writing in a very old hand.

Sources: Coccarde Tricolori, Hangar Italy, flight.com.gr, The Aviationist, Leonardo, Aeronautica Militare, European Security & Defence, Il Sole 24 Ore, Air Data News