1942–1946: an air corps born in wartime, and three Haitians at Tuskegee

Haiti’s military aviation began in the Second World War, under President Élie Lescot. According to English Wikipedia’s biography of Raymond Cassagnol, the Corps d’Aviation was created in 1942 and the United States supplied six Douglas O-38E observation aircraft, flown from Bowen Field in Port-au-Prince; Aeroflight, a specialist reference site, dates the corps to 1943. Its task, in Wikipedia’s words, was to "patrol Haitian territory, transport and communication". In July 1942 three of its members, Raymond Cassagnol, Philippe Célestin and Alix Pasquet, were chosen to train as fighter pilots at Tuskegee in Alabama with the African-American airmen of the US Army Air Forces; they graduated in class 43-G in the summer of 1943. Cassagnol came home to become the corps’ flying instructor and, according to his Wikipedia biography, logged more than 100 patrol hours over Hispaniola in AT-6 Texans.

1950–1975: Mustangs, Trojans and Skymasters under the Duvaliers

The corps outlived Lescot, who fell in 1946, and grew modestly in the Cold War. Six F-51D Mustangs arrived in 1950, the service’s first combat aircraft according to Aeroflight. They lasted more than two decades. In 1973 they were replaced by T-28 Trojans, which English Wikipedia’s T-28 article records as 12 ex-French Air Force aircraft; Aeroflight says the first helicopters, Sikorsky S-55s, came the same year. In 1975 the Trojans gave way to Cessna O-2A Skymasters. Throughout, all the aircraft lived at Bowen Field, and GlobalSecurity, in text on the old Armed Forces of Haiti, describes a corps of about 300 people whose aircraft were largely unserviceable.

Pilots against the palace: 1958 and 1969

Two episodes show how close Haiti’s airmen stood to its politics. On 29 July 1958 Alix Pasquet, the Tuskegee graduate, led a handful of Haitian exiles and five Americans in a seizure of the Dessalines barracks in Port-au-Prince; the attempt failed and Pasquet was killed, as English Wikipedia records, citing The New York Times of the following day. Raymond Cassagnol went into exile in 1962, and in May 1969, according to the Commemorative Air Force biography, he was one of the pilots of a B-25 that dropped bombs on François Duvalier’s National Palace. That raid was flown by opponents of the government, not by the corps, and is included here only because one of the corps’ founding pilots flew it. Cassagnol returned to Haiti in 1986 and died in Florida on 24 June 2023, aged 102.

1985–1995: jet trainers, decline and dissolution

The last flowering came in the 1980s. Four SIAI-Marchetti S.211 jet trainers were delivered in June 1985 and, according to English Wikipedia, were retired and put up for sale on 23 April 1990; two went to the Republic of Singapore Air Force as attrition replacements and two to private companies. Wikipedia’s SF.260 article lists six SF.260TP turboprop trainers in 1992. By the time of the US-led intervention that restored President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, English Wikipedia lists the corps’ remaining aircraft as two O-57 Grasshoppers, three BT-13 Valiants, a C-78 Bobcat and a C-46 Commando, "in very poor condition". Aeroflight states the corps was disbanded in 1994; the army as a whole was dissolved by Aristide, who, in Wikipedia’s account, suspended the armed forces on 6 December 1995 and replaced them with the civilian Haitian National Police.

2017–2026: re-founded without aircraft, in a country at war with its gangs

President Jovenel Moïse restored the Armed Forces of Haiti on 17 November 2017, and with them, in name, the aviation corps. English Wikipedia places it at the Military Aviation Base (Base de l’Aviation Militaire) at Clercine, beside Toussaint Louverture International Airport, on a site once used by a Chilean Air Force battalion of the UN mission MINUSTAH. It has no aircraft. Its work so far is training: Wikipedia cites a cooperation protocol with Argentina’s Military Aviation School signed on 16 March 2023 and Haitian cadets in Argentina, and announced training help from Mexico, Colombia and France. Meanwhile the country’s crisis deepened: armed groups attacked prisons and police stations in March 2024, the airport closed until May 2024, and Haitian soldiers were deployed to secure it. A Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission arrived from 25 June 2024 and was turned into a Gang Suppression Force by UN Security Council Resolution 2793 on 30 September 2025. On 15 October 2025, according to English Wikipedia citing the Haitian outlet Racine Info, the defence minister said aerial vehicles were on the way; no delivery had been confirmed in the sources checked by October 2026.