1920–1979: the National Guard’s air arm

Military aviation in Nicaragua grew up under American tutelage. English Wikipedia records four Curtiss JN-4s from the United States in 1920 and the first combat use of aircraft in the country on 5 July 1927, when five US Marine DH.4s attacked Augusto C. Sandino’s forces at Ocotal. The air arm of the Somoza family’s National Guard was formally organised in 1938 and had about 20 aircraft by 1945. A US aviation mission arrived in 1952, followed by P-38s, P-47s and P-51s; Spanish Wikipedia counts 26 Mustangs bought from Sweden in 1954 and 30 from the United States, replaced from 1964 by T-28 Trojans, and four to six AT-33As after the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, which the CIA launched partly from Puerto Cabezas with the Somoza government’s help. For some years, Wikipedia says, it was Central America’s strongest air force.

1978–1979: bombing the cities

The Guard’s aircraft were turned on Nicaraguan cities in the insurrection of September 1978. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which visited the country that autumn, recorded witnesses in Chinandega, León and Estelí describing aircraft and helicopters diving to fire rockets and drop bombs on residential districts, and a helicopter attack that killed two people in a Red Cross pickup. In its report of 17 November 1978 the Commission said it was totally convinced that the Guard had used its firepower indiscriminately, causing a great number of casualties and tremendous suffering, and had ordered people to stay in their homes before the bombing. The government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle did not survive the following year: he resigned on 17 July 1979 and the Sandinistas entered Managua on 19 July. Most of the Guard’s American-trained pilots left the country.

1979–1990: the Sandinista Air Force and the Hinds

The new Sandinista Air Force and Air Defence (Fuerza Aérea Sandinista y Defensa Antiaérea, FAS-DAA) was founded on 31 July 1979 with what the army’s own history calls a few abandoned aircraft. Comandante Raúl Venerio Granera led it until 1984. Soviet Mi-8 helicopters arrived in 1980, first used to support the literacy campaign; Antonov An-2s, a handful of Bell UH-1Hs, SIAI-Marchetti SF-260s and Alouette IIIs followed, and Czechoslovak L-39 jet trainers from 1982. By 1984 the force flew Mi-8, Mi-17, Mi-2 and Mi-25 helicopters and An-26 transports. What it never received were fighters: a long runway at Punta Huete was built for MiG-21s, but the United States warned against modern combat jets in Central America and none came.

The Contra war in the air

The Contra war, fought from Honduran and Costa Rican territory with US backing, made the helicopter the Sandinistas’ key weapon. English Wikipedia counts 12 Mi-25 gunships delivered in the mid-1980s, with some sources claiming 18; they attacked Contra columns and were fast enough to catch the insurgents’ light supply aircraft. The Contras answered with US-supplied shoulder-fired missiles; two Mi-25s are reported shot down, a third was damaged by Honduran F-86s and A-37s near the border, and a fourth was flown to Honduras by a defecting pilot in December 1988. The most famous kill went the other way: on 5 October 1986 a Sandinista SA-7 brought down a C-123 supply aircraft whose surviving crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, exposed the covert resupply network. The war’s human cost, and abuses by both sides, are set out below as each side and the investigators recorded them.

After 1990: from 3,000 to 1,200

Peace and the 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro ended Soviet support. The air force’s strength fell from 3,000 people in 1990 to 1,200 in 1993; combat aircraft were reduced to a single mixed squadron of Cessna 337s, L-39s and SF-260s of doubtful serviceability, and in 1992 a number of helicopters, among them four Mi-24Ds and three Mi-25Ds, and six radar units were sold to Peru. The service was renamed in the mid-1990s: Spanish Wikipedia dates the present name to June 1995, English Wikipedia to 1996. Its tasks became counter-narcotics, fisheries patrol, disaster relief and search and rescue. Reports in 2015 that it would buy MiG-29s came to nothing.

Russia returns

In the 2010s Russia became Nicaragua’s main arms supplier again. The Jamestown Foundation, citing Russian media, reported a Russian training centre opened in 2013 and close to 400 Russian military personnel in the country by 2016, plus a GLONASS station; the Nicaraguan government presents its Russian ties as cooperation against drug trafficking and organised crime. On 11 February 2025 five Mi-17 helicopters and three An-26 transports were handed over at Managua, with Gen. Julio César Avilés Castillo saying Russian supplies were extremely important against organised crime and drug trafficking. FlightGlobal’s 2026 count, as tabulated by Wikipedia, gives the air force 17 aircraft, ten of them Mi-8/Mi-17 helicopters.