When Army Aviation was re-created on 3 September 1986, its command was first set up in Brasília. Wikipedia, drawing on Falconi and Kuhlmann, records that the headquarters moved to Taubaté in 1991 and that it was placed there precisely because of the city’s position in what it calls the central nucleus of the country. The first helicopter had been delivered on 21 April 1989.

The concentration has stayed. The command’s only directly subordinate battalions, the 1st and 2nd, are both here, alongside the Army Aviation Instruction Center, the Maintenance and Supply Battalion and the Taubaté Aviation Base. The 3rd Battalion moved out gradually from 2009 to Campo Grande, and the 4th grew from a detachment at Manaus in 1992. Even so, Lucchesi and Leite, cited by Wikipedia, found about 76 per cent of the arm’s people still in Taubaté in 2018.

The Brazilian AIP lists the field as the Base de Aviação de Taubaté, a military aerodrome administered by the Brazilian Army, at 23°02’20"S 45°30’57"W and 580 m elevation. Its single runway, 08/26, is 1,500 m long and 30 m wide, asphalt, with the threshold of runway 08 displaced 400 m because of obstacles. Instrument and night visual flying are reserved for Army Aviation aircraft. The AIP also notes a closed apron position and an unserviceable aerodrome beacon.

A 1,500 m runway is enough for every helicopter the army flies but not for transport aircraft of any size, which fits an arm that has no fixed-wing aircraft. When a decree of 2 June 2020 briefly allowed the army to operate aeroplanes, with C-23 Sherpas in view, it was revoked two days later. Next to the base sits the Regional Aeroclub of Taubaté, Poder Aéreo noted in 2012.

Taubaté’s fleet tells the history of the arm. Wikipedia’s 2023 table puts 16 HA-1A Fennecs with the training centre, 12 HA-1As and seven HM-4 Jaguars with the 1st Battalion, and 16 HM-1A Super Panteras and four HM-3 Cougars with the 2nd. The Fennecs and Panteras, assembled by Helibras, were modernised under contracts of 2009 and 2010 and redesignated in 2021. Poder Aéreo reported in May 2017 that nine H225Ms had been delivered to the army, the first of them to the 1st Battalion here.

The newest arrival is the UH-60M. The US approved 12 on 24 May 2024, for $950 million including support, to replace the four UH-60Ls at Manaus and the eight Cougars split between Taubaté and Campo Grande. Twenty-two personnel trained in the US in 2024. The first aircraft arrived in late November 2025 aboard a C-17A and was formally presented at the Army Aviation Command on 15 December 2025, according to Zona Militar. Twelve Helibras-built H145Ms are planned from 2028.

Taubaté is where the arm began, but most of its operational history happened far away. Its baptism of fire, Operation Traíra in 1991, took HA-1s and HM-1s from here to the Colombian border after FARC guerrillas killed three soldiers at an army post; some of those helicopters never came back and in 1992 became the Amazônia detachment at Manaus, today’s 4th Battalion. In 1997 four helicopters went to the Ecuador–Peru border with the Military Observer Mission, the arm’s first international mission.

The pattern since has been to push aircraft out from Taubaté to the regional commands: the 3rd Battalion to Campo Grande from 2009 and two Jaguars to Belém in 2022. Taubaté remains the place where crews are trained and aircraft maintained. Helicopters have also flown from the region for emergencies at home — six for the São Paulo floods and landslides of 2023, according to Wikipedia. The arm’s patron, Lieutenant Ricardo Kirk, the army’s first pilot, died in the Contestado War in 1915, 71 years before the arm was re-created.