The Farnborough International Airshow closes today after a week that put commercial aerospace firmly back in order-book mode: deals announced across the four trade days reached a combined $84.7 billion, with 353 firm aircraft orders booked between Airbus, Boeing and Embraer. For readers of this publication, the most interesting line items sit in Embraer’s column — because a meaningful slice of every E2 sold at Farnborough will be built, and later maintained, in Portugal.
Embraer announced agreements for 28 firm E2-family aircraft: twenty E195-E2s for Abra Group — the parent of Avianca and GOL, with the agreement subject to completion of additional conditions — five E195-E2s for Spain’s Binter and three E190-E2s for Luxair. The three deals carry a further 30 purchase options and rights, taking the potential commitment to 58 aircraft, all expected to enter the backlog in the third quarter. Alongside them, lessor Azorra agreed a programme for up to 30 E-Freighter conversions.
The Portuguese content in every E2
Follow an E2 down its supply chain and it lands quickly in the Alentejo. The Évora aerospace park, inaugurated by Embraer in 2012 as twin plants for metallic and composite aerostructures, produces structural components for the company’s jets. Embraer sold the two factories to Spain’s Aernnova in 2022 in a deal of roughly €165 million, but the plants remain in full operation in Portugal, employing Portuguese aerospace workers on Embraer programmes — the industrial anchor around which the country’s fledgling aerospace cluster was built.
The maintenance annuity is even more directly Portuguese. OGMA in Alverca, majority-owned by Embraer, joined Pratt & Whitney’s geared-turbofan MRO network in late 2020 and subsequently added the PW1900G — the engine that powers the E190-E2 and E195-E2 — to its shop capability. The GTF programme represents an investment of around €80 million, close to 500 new jobs, and is the engine behind OGMA’s plan to roughly triple turnover toward €600 million a year. Every E2 ordered this week is a future overhaul candidate for Alverca’s engine shop.
The Nordic thread
The corridor connection is not hypothetical. Norway’s Widerøe was the global launch operator of the E190-E2 in 2018, flying the type on short northern runways years before the current order wave — Nordic aviation effectively road-tested the aircraft that Abra, Binter and Luxair bought this week. And earlier in the same show, Embraer’s defence arm confirmed Level D full-flight simulator training infrastructure for Sweden’s C-390 Millennium fleet, the programme under which OGMA already performs heavy maintenance for European operators — covered in these pages yesterday.
Put together, Farnborough 2026 sketched both halves of Portugal’s aerospace proposition to the Nordics: build-rate exposure through Évora’s aerostructures as E2 production climbs, and services exposure through Alverca as GTF-powered fleets — including Scandinavia’s — come due for overhaul. For a country that had no meaningful civil-aerospace export industry two decades ago, an $84.7 billion order week elsewhere is increasingly Portugal’s business too.
What to watch next. Confirmation of the Abra conditions and the Q3 backlog entry; whether Azorra’s freighter-conversion programme allocates work to Embraer’s European network; and the C-390’s continued Nordic march — Sweden’s first aircraft is due in service by the end of 2027, with OGMA’s Alverca line positioned as the type’s European maintenance home.