The FAE dates Ala de Combate 23 to Tuesday 24 October 1978, when it was set up at the new Base Aérea Eloy Alfaro on the road from Manta to Jaramijó. Its first aircraft were BAC Strikemaster Mk 89s, of which Ecuador bought 28 in all. Cessna A-37Bs joined them, and in March 1981 the wing added AT-33 armed trainers.

Manta’s light jets went to war in 1995. Spanish Wikipedia records Strikemasters and A-37Bs attacking Peruvian positions in the Cenepa valley from 3 February under fighter escort, and an AT-33 lost in an accident at Manta during the war. The wing’s official mission today covers offensive counter-air, interdiction, close air support, reconnaissance and air patrol.

The Strikemasters were a sizeable fleet for a small air force: English Wikipedia counts 22 Mk 89s and six Mk 89As delivered to Ecuador. They stayed in service long after the war; one crashed on a training mission near the Colombian border on 25 March 2009, the year before the first Super Tucanos arrived to replace them. The FAE’s page for the wing lists the Strikemaster, the A-37B, the AT-33 and the A-29 as the four types that have flown from Manta.

In 1999 the government of President Jamil Mahuad signed an agreement allowing US forces to use Manta rent-free for counter-drug flights. According to English Wikipedia, up to 475 US military personnel could be stationed there, and E-3 Sentry AWACS and US Navy P-3 Orions flew about 100 missions a month looking for drug boats leaving Colombia. In 2007, the same source says, the operation was involved in about 200 seizures totalling some 230 tonnes of cocaine, about 60 per cent of US drug interdiction in the eastern Pacific.

Rafael Correa’s government did not want it to continue. On 19 March 2008 the constituent assembly outlawed foreign military bases, on 26 July 2008 Ecuador formally told the United States the lease would not be renewed, and the last US anti-narcotics mission left on 17 July 2009. The operation moved to Palanquero in Colombia.

Ecuador’s Super Tucanos began to arrive in 2010: 18 in all, after the order was cut from 24 to free money for Cheetahs. English Wikipedia places two squadrons at Manta, 2313 “Halcones” for border surveillance and training and 2311 “Dragones” for counter-insurgency. Halcones marked its 60th anniversary at a change of command in August 2026, at which the wing also named its TOP GUN of the year.

With the Cheetah gone, the A-29 is the FAE’s only combat type, and Manta sits on the coast where much of Ecuador’s cocaine is shipped. In April 2026 FAE Super Tucanos trained with US Navy Super Hornets from USS Nimitz, and in September 2026 Infodefensa, citing a CNN report, named Manta as a possible base for US MQ-9A Reaper operations — a plan neither government had confirmed.

From 14 to 19 September 2026 Ala de Combate 23 hosted the Peruvian Air Force for UNIDOS V, the fifth edition of a joint exercise. The FAE said the two services practised combined operations against transnational organised crime, search and rescue and interoperable communications along the border. For two air forces that fought over the Cordillera del Cóndor in 1981 and 1995, it was an unremarkable press release, and that is the point.

The exercise came a year after Ecuador’s air force commander, General del Aire Celiano Cevallos Calderón, decorated his Peruvian counterpart in May 2025 for inter-institutional cooperation, and it fitted the wing’s present task: much of what the two air forces now watch for along their shared border is drug trafficking rather than each other.