1923–1960s: a flotilla becomes an air force

President Alfonso Quiñónez Molina decreed the Salvadoran Air Fleet (Flotilla Aérea Salvadoreña) on 20 March 1923, twenty days after taking office; the force kept its initials, FAS, when it became the Fuerza Aérea Salvadoreña. Captain Humberto Aberle ran the first military flying course from 14 July 1923, and on 12 July 1924 Juan Ramón Munés and Ricardo Aberle became the country’s first military pilots. The air force’s own history lists a Mexican-built TNCA Serie A among the first aircraft, then five Hanriot H.320s and a Breguet 14 named Gerardo Barrios bought from France. Under General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez three Curtiss-Wright CW-14 Ospreys arrived on 16 August 1933, followed by a Caproni A.P.1 and Fairchild trainers. After 1945 came C-47s, AT-6s and, in 1957, twenty Goodyear FG-1D Corsairs: the backbone of the force that went to war twelve years later.

July 1969: the Hundred Hours War

The war with Honduras in July 1969, called the Football War abroad and the Hundred Hours War in El Salvador, began at 18:10 on 14 July. By the FAS’s own account it had about 25 pilots, five FG-1D Corsairs, five Cavalier F-51 Mustangs, six C-47s, a single B-26 and a handful of light aircraft, against more than 52 Honduran aircraft; twenty civilian aircraft of a reserve flying club were armed with mortar bombs, and some 30 machines attacked Toncontín and other Honduran fields at dusk. Honduran Corsairs struck back at Ilopango and the fuel stores at Acajutla and Cutuco from 15 July. On 17 July two Salvadoran pilots died: Captain Douglas Varela Moreno, shot down and, the FAS says, killed after capture, and Captain Guillermo Reynaldo Cortez. Honduras credits Captain Fernando Soto with three kills that day. Both sides’ figures are set out below as claims.

Israel’s jets: Ouragan, Fouga and Arava

The war left the FAS with worn-out piston fighters and no jets. Israel filled the gap: between 1973 and 1975, the official history says, it supplied 18 Dassault MD 450 Ouragans, 12 CM.170 Fouga Magisters and four IAI Arava transports, and English Wikipedia dates the first jet, a Fouga, to 1974. Eight more C-47s came in 1974. The Ouragans gave El Salvador the first jet fighter-bombers in Central America’s smallest country, but they were already old designs, and most of what the FAS flew at the end of the 1970s was second-hand. James Corum counted 67 aircraft and fewer than a thousand men in 1980, organised in four combat squadrons plus transport and training units. That was the force the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) set out to destroy.

The civil war in the air, 1980–1992

On the night of 26–27 January 1982 commandos of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), one of the FMLN’s groups, got into Ilopango and set charges on the parked aircraft. The FAS history says more than half its fleet was destroyed; Corum lists five Ouragans, six Hueys and three C-47s destroyed and five more aircraft badly damaged, while the Washington Post’s sources at the time spoke of at least five of 14 UH-1Hs and three of about 16 jets damaged. Washington replaced the losses fast: A-37B Dragonflies, O-2A spotters and C-123K transports in the first half of 1982, AC-47 gunships from late 1984, and so many Hueys that the helicopter fleet grew from 19 to 46 during 1984. By 1987 the FAS had 67 helicopters but, Corum notes, only 70 active pilots for 135 aircraft.

What the Truth Commission found

The air war had a civilian cost that is still argued over. Tutela Legal, the archdiocese’s human rights office, counted 371 civilians killed by air attack in 1985; Corum, writing for the US Air Force’s Airpower Journal, put the wartime total at about two thousand. The UN Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, reporting on 15 March 1993, recorded among its findings an air and ground attack on thousands of peasants crossing the Lempa on 17 March 1981, helicopter fire on some 5,000 fleeing peasants at San Esteban Catarina on 10 March 1982, and A-37 bombing at Tenancingo after an FMLN attack, in which it says some 100 civilians died. Overall it attributed about 85 per cent of the abuses it examined to state forces and also documented FMLN crimes. The high command rejected the report as biased; an amnesty law followed within days, and was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016.

Today: A-37s, Hueys and peacekeepers

Since the peace accords of 16 January 1992 the FAS has shrunk to two brigades: the First Air Brigade at Ilopango, with helicopters and transports, and the Second at Comalapa, beside the international airport, with the A-37B fighter-bomber group. FlightGlobal’s 2025 count, as tabulated by Wikipedia, is 51 aircraft, led by 15 A-37Bs and 15 UH-1-family helicopters. The Dragonfly has outlived predictions of its retirement: at least nine flew over San Salvador on 15 September 2026. The United States has kept the fleet going with MD 530F helicopters for UN deployments and, in November 2025, further helicopters for the Haiti mission. The worst recent loss was a UH-1H that crashed near Pasaquina on 8 September 2024, killing all nine aboard, among them the national police director.