When the Ministry of Aeronautics was created in January 1941, the army’s flying school and the navy’s were abolished, and in March of that year a single Escola de Aeronáutica was set up at Campo dos Afonsos in Rio de Janeiro, the cradle of Brazilian military aviation. Within two decades the school had outgrown the crowded city field.

On 17 October 1960 the Destacamento Precursor de Aeronáutica, the advance party for a new academy, was inaugurated at Pirassununga, with Major Aloysio Lontra Netto as its first commander. The school took the name Academia da Força Aérea in 1969 and moved to Pirassununga in 1971, graduating its first class of aviators and supply officers at the end of that year.

Portuguese Wikipedia describes a campus built for self-sufficiency: 215,246 square metres of buildings, 50 km of roads, 41 km of power lines and a water plant able to supply six million litres a day. The airfield, Campo Fontenelle in the Brazilian AIP, has three parallel runways so that two training squadrons can work at once.

Cadets fly the T-25 Universal with the Apolo squadron and then the T-27 Tucano with the Cometa squadron. English Wikipedia gives about 50 hours on the T-25 and about 120 on the Tucano; Portuguese Wikipedia gives 75 and 130. About a third of aviation cadets are eliminated before solo, and the top 30 pilots of each class go on to the fighter course.

The Tucano has served the academy since the 1980s. On 9 December 2021 the Commander of the Air Force, Lt Brig. Carlos de Almeida Baptista Junior, led the flight that delivered the first four T-27Ms, modernised with a new instrument panel by the company Albatross and the Lagoa Santa maintenance depot.

Not everything goes to plan. On 26 October 2023 a storm with winds of up to 100 km/h hit Pirassununga; according to information circulating on social media, reported by Poder Aéreo, seven T-27s were damaged and hangar structures destroyed. In early 2020 a measles outbreak infected 76 first-year cadets.

The Esquadrilha da Fumaça was born in 1952 among the instructors of the old Escola de Aeronáutica in Rio. Its first display, on 14 May 1952, wrote the letters FAB in smoke over Copacabana beach, with North American T-6s fitted with an oil tank to make the smoke. The T-6 flew 1,225 displays.

The French Fouga Magister replaced it in 1968 but, in English Wikipedia’s words, proved unsuitable for Brazilian conditions; after 46 displays the team went back to the T-6 in 1972. It was disbanded in 1977 and re-formed on 8 December 1983 with the T-25, then the Tucano, which flew more than 2,000 displays. The first two A-29 Super Tucanos were delivered on 30 September 2012. By its 72nd anniversary in 2024, Poder Aéreo counted more than 4,000 demonstrations in Brazil and abroad.

Selection is fierce. English Wikipedia says about 10,000 candidates sit the entrance examinations each year and only the best 650 pass to the next phases; more than 700 cadets are at the academy at any time. Since 2016 the air force’s preparatory school for cadets has also taken women, with 20 of its 180 annual places reserved for them in that year.

Living together brings its own risks. From the end of January 2020 a measles outbreak spread among the first-year cadets: by 3 March, 76 had been diagnosed and 25 more military personnel were awaiting results. The cadets were isolated in their quarters and the whole community was vaccinated from 21 February; nobody needed hospital treatment.

On its open day, the Domingo Aéreo, the academy draws some of the biggest air show crowds in Brazil. Portuguese Wikipedia records about 57,000 visitors in 2006, 53,000 in 2011 and a record 92,000 in 2015.