The crown jewel at Cameri

On 12 March 2015 a grey stealth fighter was rolled out of a hangar at Cameri, in the rice country of Piedmont. Its serial was AL-1, and it was the first F-35A ever assembled outside the United States. Lockheed Martin’s programme chief Lorraine Martin called the plant a national crown jewel. The factory was run by Alenia Aermacchi, an arm of a company most people still knew as Finmeccanica. Within two years that company would carry a new name, borrowed from the Renaissance genius whose notebooks contain one of history’s most famous sketches of a flying machine with a spinning screw: Leonardo.

Born from the rubble in 1948

Leonardo did not begin as an aircraft maker. On 18 March 1948 the state-owned Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale created the Società Finanziaria Meccanica, Finmeccanica for short, as the holding company for its mechanical-engineering businesses. Its early portfolio reads like a museum of Italian industry: Alfa Romeo cars, Ansaldo heavy engineering and, later, railway rolling stock. Over the following decades almost all of that would go. Alfa Romeo was sold to Fiat in 1986, and in 2015 Hitachi bought AnsaldoBreda and a stake of about 40 per cent in Ansaldo STS. What was left was defence, electronics and aircraft.

Collecting the aircraft makers

The aircraft came in a long chain of mergers. Aeritalia was formed in 1969 from Fiat and Finmeccanica businesses; in 1989 it was merged with Selenia to create Alenia. When the state holding EFIM collapsed in 1992, Agusta, the helicopter maker, passed to Finmeccanica too. The group was partly privatised and listed in Milan in 1993. In July 2000 it agreed with Britain’s GKN to merge Agusta with Westland Helicopters, and on 26 May 2004 it bought out GKN’s half for £1.06 billion. Aermacchi, the Varese trainer specialist, followed in 2002–2003, America’s DRS Technologies in 2008 and Poland’s PZL-Świdnik in 2010.

The helicopter that conquered the world

The jewel of that inheritance is a helicopter that began as a transatlantic partnership. The AB139 was designed jointly by Agusta and Bell and first flew on 3 February 2001. Bell walked away in 2005, the machine became the AW139, and it went on to sell to more than 200 operators in 60 countries by 2013. By July 2024 more than 1,200 had been built, at Vergiate, Philadelphia and, through a joint venture, near Moscow. Its younger siblings, the AW169 and AW189, and the big three-engine AW101 fill out a range that delivered 182 helicopters in 2025 alone.

Bribes, trials and a long acquittal

Success had a darker side. In February 2013 chief executive Giuseppe Orsi was arrested over a 2010 sale of 12 AW101s to the Indian government, worth about €560 million; prosecutors alleged bribes had been paid. India cancelled the contract. Orsi was acquitted, convicted on appeal in 2016 and sentenced to four and a half years, acquitted again in 2018, and finally cleared by Italy’s highest court on 22 May 2019 for lack of proof. It was not the first time: in the 1980s Agusta had been accused of bribing a Belgian party to win an A109 order, a scandal that later brought down NATO Secretary General Willy Claes.

One company, one new name

In 2014 a new chief executive, Mauro Moretti, set out to turn a loose federation of brands into a single business. On 1 January 2016 Finmeccanica absorbed AgustaWestland, Alenia Aermacchi, Selex ES, OTO Melara and WASS outright. On 28 April 2016 shareholders approved a new name, Leonardo-Finmeccanica, and from 1 January 2017 the company was simply Leonardo. In 2025 it reported revenues of €19.5 billion, new orders of €23.8 billion and a backlog above €46 billion. It holds 21 per cent of the Eurofighter consortium, 25 per cent of MBDA and a third of the Anglo-Italian-Japanese GCAP fighter venture.

Trainers, transports and a sound barrier

Leonardo also builds the jets that teach fighter pilots. The M-346 Master began as a joint design with Russia’s Yakovlev; the partners split in 2000, Moscow’s half became the Yak-130 and Varese’s the M-346, first flown on 15 July 2004. In December 2008 it reached Mach 1.15, which the maker hailed as the first time an all-Italian aircraft had broken the sound barrier in 50 years. The C-27J Spartan transport had a stranger fate: chosen by the Pentagon in 2007, it was dropped by the US Air Force after budget cuts, and by 2013 brand-new examples were flying straight to the Arizona boneyard.

Fábricas

• Vergiate · Vergiate, Lombardy — Main final-assembly line for the AW139; AW149 and AW249 first flights
• Cascina Costa · Samarate, Lombardy — Historic Agusta site; AW189 first flight in 2011
• Yeovil · Yeovil, Somerset, England — Former Westland works; AW101 production, chosen for the RAF’s AW149s
• PZL-Świdnik · Świdnik, Poland — Acquired in 2010; hundreds of AW109 fuselages; AW149 line opened June 2024
• Philadelphia · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA — US helicopter assembly, including AW139
• Venegono Superiore · Venegono Superiore, Varese — Former Aermacchi trainer works and Alenia Aermacchi legal seat
• Cameri FACO · Cameri, Piedmont — F-35 final assembly and check-out, owned by the Italian Ministry of Defence; first F-35A outside the US rolled out 2015; builds F-35A wings
• Pomigliano d’Arco and Grottaglie · Campania and Apulia — Aerostructures plants of the former Alenia Aermacchi

Gente

• Giuseppe Orsi · chief executive — Arrested February 2013 over the Indian AW101 deal; finally acquitted 2019
• Mauro Moretti · chief executive from 2014 — Led the One Company restructuring of 2016
• Alessandro Profumo · chief executive from May 2017
• Roberto Cingolani · chief executive from May 2023

Récords y primicias

• First F-35A assembled outside the United States, AL-1, rolled out at Cameri on 12 March 2015
• AW109S Grand round-the-world helicopter speed record, 11 days 7 hours 2 minutes, August 2008
• M-346 reached Mach 1.15 in December 2008, billed as the first all-Italian aircraft through the sound barrier in 50 years
• AW139 global fleet passed one million flight hours by July 2014