The engineer with a camera

In 1913 a Spanish army engineer named José Ortiz-Echagüe set off to fly a Morane-Saulnier from Paris to Madrid. The aircraft caught fire. He got out, saved the engine, carried it to Morocco and, in the middle of a military campaign, built a new aeroplane around it. That was the man who, on 3 March 1923, founded Construcciones Aeronáuticas S.A. — CASA. He held one of Spain’s earliest pilot’s licences and flew across the Strait of Gibraltar in 1914. And in his spare time he was one of the most celebrated photographers in Spain, named in 1935 by the magazine American Photography as one of the three best in the world. Decades later he would also found the car maker SEAT.

Breguets, flying boats and a flight to Brazil

CASA began like most young aircraft firms: building someone else’s designs. The Getafe works outside Madrid opened in May 1924 with an order for 26 French Breguet 19 bombers, and production of the type eventually reached 400. A second factory at Cádiz, opened in 1926, built Dornier Wal flying boats under licence. Two of those Getafe Breguets became national heroes. In 1929 the long-range Jesús del Gran Poder flew from Seville to Bahia in Brazil, 6,746 km in 43 hours 50 minutes, and in 1933 the Cuatro Vientos carried Mariano Barberán and Joaquín Collar to Havana. The same year as the Brazil flight CASA flew its first home-grown aeroplane, the little CASA III sporting monoplane.

A factory on both sides of a war

The Civil War split CASA in two. Getafe lay in the Republican zone, so production moved east, first to Reus and then to Sabadell, where the factory built Soviet Polikarpov I-15 biplane fighters for the Republic — 287 of them. A batch of I-16 monoplanes followed, but only 22 were finished, all after the war had ended. When Franco won, CASA returned to Getafe and opened a new plant at Tablada in Seville. The licences now came from Germany: Gotha trainers, the Bücker Jungmeister and above all the Bücker Jungmann, of which CASA built 555. Production of the Jungmann ran on until the late 1950s, and from the 201st aircraft it used a Spanish-built Tigre engine.

Heinkels with Merlins, and a career in the movies

The strangest chapter began in 1940, with a licence for the Heinkel He 111 bomber. By the time production got going Germany had lost the war and its Jumo engines had dried up, so CASA fitted later aircraft with Rolls-Royce Merlins — the engine of the Spitfire. Between 1945 and 1956 the company built 236 of these CASA 2.111s, alongside 170 Spanish-built Junkers Ju 52 trimotors. The twist came in the 1960s: when film-makers needed a Luftwaffe for Battle of Britain and Patton, the Spanish Heinkels played the part. So a German bomber, built in Spain with British engines, flew for the Luftwaffe on screen a quarter of a century after the real battle. Four CASA-built Ju 52s are still airworthy today.

Learning to design again

Licence work kept the lights on but left CASA without its own design know-how. In 1946 it reopened a projects office under Francisco Trincado and produced a trio of transports — the Alcotán, the Halcón and the Azor — built in tiny numbers. The real education came from America. From 1957 CASA overhauled the US Air Force’s F-100 Super Sabres in Europe, and in the 1960s it built 70 Northrop F-5s for the Spanish Air Force. Ortiz-Echagüe himself, by then in his seventies, is recorded as riding in the back of an F-100 repaired at his own factory in 1959. Meanwhile the Spanish state had been buying in since 1943, reaching 99.2 per cent by 1992.

The box that conquered the world

Then came the aircraft that made CASA’s name. The C-212 Aviocar, accepted by the Air Ministry in 1968, first flew on 26 March 1971: a boxy, high-winged turboprop with a rear ramp, built to haul people and cargo into rough strips. It sold to air forces, airlines, skydivers and Antarctic research teams. Spain built 485 before handing the line to Indonesia, which has added well over a hundred more. In 1971 CASA also swallowed Hispano Aviación, and in 1972 it joined Airbus Industrie as a founding partner. The C-101 Aviojet trainer followed in 1977, then two bigger heirs to the Aviocar: the CN-235, developed with Indonesia’s IPTN, and the stretched C-295.

Into Airbus

In December 1999 CASA agreed to join Aérospatiale-Matra and DaimlerChrysler Aerospace in EADS, the group formed in July 2000 that is now Airbus, and the Spanish firm became EADS CASA. Its military transport division was folded into Airbus Military in April 2009, and in 2014 the company took the name Airbus Defence and Space S.A.U. The badge has gone, but the work has not: Spanish Eurofighters are assembled at Getafe, the A400M first flew from Seville, and the C295 still rolls out of San Pablo. The last Spanish-built C295 for India was handed over in Seville on 2 August 2025 — a direct descendant of the box that conquered the world.

Fábricas

• Getafe works · Getafe, Madrid — Opened May 1924 between Getafe air base and the Madrid–Valencia railway; evacuated during the Civil War; now Eurofighter final assembly and registered office
• Puntales works · Cádiz — Opened 1926 for Dornier Wal flying boats; closed 1988 and moved to Puerto Real and El Puerto de Santa María
• Reus and Sabadell · Catalonia — Wartime refuges for the Getafe works, 1936–1939; built Polikarpov fighters
• Tablada works · Seville — Opened after the Civil War for licence-built German aircraft, starting with the He 111 programme in 1940
• San Pablo · Seville and La Rinconada — Beside Seville airport; C295 final assembly; A400M first flight on 11 December 2009
• Triana · Seville — Former Hispano Aviación factory, acquired with the 1971 merger
• Pirámides works · Madrid — Opened 1945 for machining, foundry and car gearboxes; worked until 1982

Pessoas

• José Ortiz-Echagüe (1886–1980) · founder, military engineer, pilot, photographer — Flew over the Strait of Gibraltar in 1914; later founded SEAT (1950) and became its honorary life president
• Francisco Trincado · head of the projects office from 1946 — Restarted CASA’s own design work after years of licence building
• Ignacio Jiménez and Francisco Iglesias · pilots — Flew the CASA-built Breguet 19 Jesús del Gran Poder from Seville to Bahia in 1929
• Mariano Barberán and Joaquín Collar · pilots — Flew the Breguet 19 Cuatro Vientos to Havana in 1933
• Domingo Ureña-Raso · chairman of EADS CASA from February 2009

Recordes e pioneirismos

• Breguet 19 Jesús del Gran Poder: Seville to Bahia, 6,746 km in 43 hours 50 minutes, 1929 — second on the distance-record list at the time
• Breguet 19 Cuatro Vientos: Seville to Havana, 1933, one of the great feats of Spanish aviation
• First European company to win the US Zero Defects award, for its F-100 Super Sabre maintenance programme
• C-212 fleet passed one million flight hours in 1988 and two million in 1996
• 1,000th Airbus horizontal stabiliser delivered on 24 June 1992
• C-101 Aviojet: 285,000 training hours with the Spanish Air and Space Force, 1980–2025