The smuggler who came back

In 1950 a court in Los Angeles convicted a former TWA flight engineer named Al Schwimmer of breaking the American Neutrality Acts. Two years earlier he had bought surplus warplanes, B-17 Flying Fortresses among them, and spirited about 30 of them to the new state of Israel by way of the Azores and Czechoslovakia, recruiting veteran crews to fly them. He lost his voting rights and veterans’ benefits and paid a $10,000 fine, and he flatly refused to ask for a pardon. Bill Clinton gave him one anyway, in 2001. By then the smuggler had built Israel’s largest company.

Seventy men in a hangar at Lod

The invitation came from David Ben-Gurion and the push from Shimon Peres, then director general of the Ministry of Defence. In 1953 Schwimmer, who had been running an aircraft maintenance business in Burbank, California, set up Bedek Aviation in a government hangar at Lod with about 70 employees. Bedek means repair, and repair was the job: keeping the Israeli Air Force’s piston fighters and early jets flying. In 1957 it signed to assemble the French Fouga Magister trainer under licence, and the Tzukit, as Israel called it, went on to train Israeli pilots for half a century. In June 1967 Magisters flew close support missions against Egyptian and Jordanian forces, losing six. Schwimmer stayed in charge for 24 years.

France says no

Then Paris slammed the door. In January 1969 France imposed an arms embargo on Israel, stranding 50 Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and largely paid for, and cutting off support for the Mirage III fleet already in service. IAI simply built the Mirage itself. How it got the drawings is still argued over: official accounts say Israel already held them, some authors point to Mossad, others say Dassault quietly helped, and one account traces the engine data to the Swiss firm Sulzer. The result, the Nesher, flew in 1969 and claimed more than a hundred kills in the 1973 war. Re-engined with the American J79, it became the Kfir, the first Israeli fighter in quantity production.

The Lion that was killed by one vote

Kfir means lion cub. Its intended successor was the Lavi, the lion, a small, agile fourth-generation fighter that first flew on 31 December 1986 with test pilot Menachem Shmul at the controls; he stayed up for 26 minutes. Test pilots called its handling excellent, and IAI dreamed of exporting more than 400. Washington, which was paying for much of it, feared a rival to the F-16. In August 1987 the Israeli cabinet cancelled the programme by 12 votes to 11. IAI, then employing more than 22,000 people, cut 5,500 jobs the following year. The bitterness lasted for decades, yet the radar, avionics and software developed for the Lavi became products IAI sold for years.

Drones, before anyone called them that

If the Lavi was IAI’s great loss, drones were its great bet. In the 1970s its engineers built the Scout, a little twin-boom reconnaissance aircraft with a pusher propeller. In June 1982, during the Lebanon war, Scouts and Tadiran’s rival Mastiffs helped Israeli jets find and destroy all 28 Syrian missile sites in the Bekaa Valley. The Americans noticed. The Pioneer that followed served the US Navy and Marines, and in 1991 Iraqi soldiers on Failaka Island famously surrendered to one circling above them. That very Pioneer now hangs in the Smithsonian. The Heron family followed, flying for Germany, India, Australia, Canada and others, with endurance of up to 52 hours.

Business jets with an American badge

There is a civilian IAI that most travellers never notice. In the late 1960s it bought the production line for the American Jet Commander business jet and moved it to Israel, where it grew into the Westwind, the Astra and the Galaxy. Gulfstream bought the Galaxy programme in 2001 for $330 million, but IAI kept building the jets, now with Gulfstream badges: the G100, G150, G200 and the G280, of which some 300 had been built by mid-2025. Next door, the old Bedek repair shop became one of the world’s biggest converters of airliners into freighters, from Boeing 747s to 737s, 767s and Airbus A330s.

Missiles, satellites and a record year

Today IAI is much more than an aircraft maker. It builds the Arrow missiles that shoot down ballistic missiles above the atmosphere, the Ofeq spy satellites and the Shavit rocket that launches them, Barak air defences, Harop loitering munitions and ELTA radars. Not every chapter flatters it: a deal to sell Phalcon airborne radar aircraft to China was cancelled under American pressure in 2000, and Israel paid China $350 million in compensation. In 2025 IAI posted record sales of about $7.4 billion, net income of about $712 million and an order backlog of about $29 billion, two thirds of it for export. The government is now weighing a partial flotation.

工場

• Main complex, Ben Gurion Airport · Lod — Headquarters and main plants on about 2,000 dunams on the eastern side of the airport; grew from the original Bedek hangar
• Other plants · Yehud, Ashdod, Beer Yaakov, Beersheba, Golan Heights, Tel Aviv, Petah Tikva — Systems, electronics, missiles and components
• ELTA Systems · Ashdod — Radar and electronic-warfare subsidiary

人々

• Al Schwimmer · founder and first chief executive — American-born flight engineer who smuggled warplanes to Israel in 1948; led IAI for 24 years; Israel Prize 2006; died 2011
• Shimon Peres · director general of the Ministry of Defence — Initiated the founding of Bedek in 1953
• Menachem Shmul · test pilot — Flew the Lavi on its first flight, 31 December 1986
• Boaz Levy · chief executive — CEO during the record results of 2024 and 2025

記録と初記録

• First aircraft fully designed and built in Israel: the Arava, first flown 27 November 1969
• Nesher pilots claimed more than 100 kills in the 1973 Yom Kippur War
• Scout drones were among the first used in combat, by South Africa in 1981 and Israel in 1982
• A Pioneer drone received the surrender of Iraqi troops on Failaka Island in 1991
• Heron demonstrated 52 hours of continuous flight
• Record financial year in 2025: sales about $7.4 billion, net income about $712 million