RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Those who witnessed their meetings tell that every time Mauricio Macri held a meeting with Emmanuel Macron, the French president asked him if he would finally buy the last five operational Super Etendard Modernise that the Argentine Airforce had.
The Argentine president himself found it curious that his French counterpart was so keen on a purchase that, a priori, would seem small compared to the extensive schedule of issues between the two nations.
It started in January 2017, when the then Minister of Defense Julio Martinez informed the French ambassador in Argentina, Pierre Henri Guignard, that the South American country intended to acquire these units.
The purchase finally materialized in 2018 with the payment of €12.5 million (US$14 million), and the units arrived in Argentina in May 2019. At the January 2022 quotation, the operation would have meant almost 1.5 billion Argentine pesos.
It was an operation that gave the Argentine Navy‘s Naval Aviation a small glimmer of hope after years of disinvestment and lack of operability.
However, more than two years after their arrival, the planes still have not flown a single minute and remain housed in the sheds of the Comandante Espora Naval Air Base in Bahía Blanca.
According to the official documentation to which TN had access, they arrived in the country with expired components, and the Government of Alberto Fernandez has not been able to find the spare parts to put them into operation.
The story of the Super Etendard Modernise that never flew
The operation of Vialidad Nacional surprised locals and strangers alike. Huge trucks were transporting the five Super Etendard Modernise of more than 14 meters long from the port of Bahía Blanca to the base Comandante Espora.
That is the home base of the Second Naval Aviation Fighter and Attack Squadron of the Argentine Navy, which already has a batch of old Super Etendards deactivated due to lack of spare parts.
These five new units were purchased precisely to revitalize the squadron and provide it with operational aircraft so that its pilots could fly and put into practice what they had learned on the ground.
The Super Etendard transfer operation, in May 2019
But so far, none of this has happened. According to a response from the Argentine Navy to a TN request for access to public information, the planes arrived with expired elements, and the Government of Alberto Fernandez did not manage, so far, to get the necessary spare parts to put them into operation.
The problem lies in the fact that the ejector cartridges of the pilots’ seats have expired, which means that the safety of those who operate the units is not guaranteed.
The main drawback is that the planes were purchased with a Martin-Baker ejector seat, which has components of English origin.
Because the United Kingdom blockades Argentina, finding a supplier in the market is not easy. Besides, in these two years without use, other elements have expired.
Accusations between Macrismo and Kirchnerism
In this part of the story, the crossed versions begin. Sources close to the former Minister of Defense Oscar Aguad assure that the government of Mauricio Macri bought the planes despite knowing that they did not have the ejector cartridges since they had advanced negotiations with a U.S. company that was going to provide the supplies in question.
They even assure that they had made contact with Martin-Baker itself. “In 2019, a purchase process was initiated with an American company that fell through in 2020. I do not know the reasons,” said a former official of the portfolio that during Macri’s years in power led, in the first term, Martinez, and then Aguad.
“At the time of the purchase, there was not a very big estrangement with the United Kingdom, the Macri government had established good relations with the world, and we were close to getting the missing aircraft”, they add.
According to the documentation provided by the Argentine Navy itself, the aircraft “arrived in the country in 2019 with expired components” and added: “So far they have not been able to fly due to the lack of those components to replace the expired materials and the impossibility of accessing others due to their British origin”.
TN consulted the current management of Jorge Taiana in Defense to verify why the Super Etendard did not fly during the first two years of Alberto Fernandez’s administration.
“We cannot provide more information than that provided by the Argentine Navy. The previous government acquired the planes without sufficient components and never flew”, limiting themselves to answer.
As TN could reconstruct, negotiations with the U.S. company that would provide the ejector cartridges were advanced until the Argentine Navy’s purchasing office in Europe requested guarantees from the company, which caused the operation to fall through. It happened in the first months of 2020.
“We never knew if this refusal to deliver the documentation was a decision of the company or a British imposition due to the bad relationship with the current management,” says a source of the naval force.
The Argentine Navy is looking for a national company
Jorge Taiana’s current defense administration is now trying to find a national company to manufacture these ejector cartridges, but so far, no progress has been made.
“We are interacting with suppliers to ensure the availability of spare parts and that they can fly in the short term”, says the official document.
The five aircraft that Argentina bought from the French Navy have decades of service and, once ready to fly, will only have a useful life of 10 years.
Forty spare parts and accessories containers came along with the planes since the original idea was to put the old Super Etendard that the Navy already had into service. That didn’t happen either.
“The idea was to give naval aviation ten more years of life. A historic squadron is about to die”, summarized sadly in the Argentine Navy.