1994: an air force from what the Derg left behind

Eritrea won its independence war without an air force. The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front fought on the ground against an Ethiopian air force that bombed it for three decades, and when it won, Ethiopian aircraft were left behind at Asmara. Wikipedia dates the Eritrean Air Force to 1994 and says it began with abandoned Ethiopian aircraft, including MiG-21s; no second source we could reach confirms that those jets flew in Eritrean colours, so they are not in the fleet list below. The founder was Habtezion Hadgu, a former Ethiopian Air Force pilot who, according to Wikipedia, had defected to the EPLF in the late 1980s and recruited other ex-Ethiopian officers. Asmara airport, opened by the Italians in 1922 as the military field of Gura, became the air force’s home and still is. Eritrea has no official language; Tigrinya, Arabic and English are its working languages, and government English uses the name Eritrean Air Force.

1996–1998: trainers, MiGs and the first raids

The first real combat equipment was Italian. Eritrea ordered six Aermacchi MB-339CE jet trainers in 1996, a version of the MB-339C built for it with the Viper 680-43 engine, and Wikipedia’s MB-339 article dates the first combat unit to 1997. When the border dispute over Badme turned into war in May 1998 the air force was tiny. Its first missions came on 5 June 1998, the day Ethiopian jets bombed Asmara airport with bombs and napalm. One Ethiopian aircraft was shot down over Asmara and its pilot, Bezabeh Petros, captured; Wikipedia notes he had already been a prisoner of the EPLF once before. In the same year Eritrea bought eight MiG-29s, in what Wikipedia calls a sort of arms race with Ethiopia’s purchase of Su-27s. On 26 June 1998 the UN Security Council noted both governments’ pledges to stop air strikes.

Mekele, 5 June 1998: what the Claims Commission found

The Eritrean raid of 5 June 1998 on Mekele is the best-documented air action of the war, because an international tribunal examined it. The Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission found that four MB-339 sorties attacked Mekele that afternoon: the first strafed, the second dropped cluster bombs on the airport runway, and the third and fourth, at about five and six o’clock, dropped cluster bombs on the Ayder School neighbourhood some seven kilometres away. It found that 53 civilians were killed, including 12 schoolchildren, and 185 wounded. Eritrea argued that the bombing was an accident incidental to legitimate military operations. The Commission, noting the long odds against two consecutive sorties making the same error and drawing adverse inferences from Eritrea’s refusal to provide pilot testimony, held in April 2004 that Eritrea was liable for the deaths and damage caused by the third and fourth sorties. In a separate award in 2005 it held Ethiopia liable for bombing the Harsile water reservoir that supplied Assab.

1999–2000: MiG-29 against Su-27, claim against claim

The air war of 1999 and 2000 is told almost entirely through Ethiopian claims. Wikipedia records Ethiopian Su-27s damaging an Eritrean MiG-29 on 21 February 1999 and shooting down MiG-29s on 25 and 26 February 1999. Ethiopia claimed seven MiG-29s in all; Wikipedia says only two to four can be confirmed, and Eritrea disputes the claims of May 2000. Claims run the other way too: Wikipedia’s Su-25 article says an Eritrean MiG-29 shot down an Ethiopian Su-25 on 15 May 2000, killing its pilot, and its MiG-23 article credits Eritrean MiG-29s with three Ethiopian MiG-23BNs. Wikipedia’s war article lists Eritrean losses as four MiG-29As and one MB-339CE. Eritrea has published no figures of its own. The Algiers Agreement ended the war on 12 December 2000; total deaths are estimated at between 70,000 and 300,000.

2003–2018: the Flankers arrive, the embargo bites

After the war the air force bought Flankers of its own. Milavia records the first Su-27s arriving in summer 2003, with at least one single-seater and one Su-27UB two-seater; Wikipedia’s Su-27 article says two came from Ukraine in 2002–2003. Habtezion Hadgu, suspended after the war according to Wikipedia, left command in January 2003; Major General Teklai Habteselassie has led the service since. Then the money and the spare parts ran out. On 23 December 2009 the Security Council imposed an arms embargo on Eritrea over alleged support for al-Shabaab and the border dispute with Djibouti, and Wikipedia says the Russian maintenance contract ended because it breached the ban, leaving the fighters rarely flown. In 2012, Wikipedia records, two officers flew a government jet to Saudi Arabia and sought asylum. From September 2015 the UAE turned Assab airport into a base for its war in Yemen, which UN monitors said in 2016 could itself breach the embargo.

2018–2026: a small fleet, a training role and a tense border

The embargo was lifted by resolution 2444 in 2018, the year Eritrea and Ethiopia made peace, but there is no published sign of a re-equipment programme. FlightGlobal’s 2025 directory counts one Su-27 fighter and one Su-27 trainer, six Mi-24s, six Mi-17/171s, one Bell 412, four Harbin Y-12s and a King Air 200, and no MiG-29s; Wikipedia’s MiG-29 list says none were operational by 2026, against seven counted in 2023. What the government publishes instead is training: 250 cadets graduated in Asmara in May 2019, the College of Aviation held its first commencement in 2022, and from 2022 Somali soldiers trained at the air force headquarters. In the Tigray war of 2020–2022 Eritrean ground forces fought on Ethiopia’s side; what the air force did is largely unreported. Since 2024 Ethiopia’s talk of access to the sea has brought the two countries back to the edge of conflict.

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