Brazilian aircraft-maker Embraer may sell fighter plane 314-b1 Super Tucano to US

Embraer, the Brazilian aerospace conglomerate that produces commercial, military, and corporate aircraft, is holding preliminary negotiations to sell the United States government the 314-B1 Super Tucano light attack and training planes. The 8 planes that Embraer hopes to sell are for use in Iraq, the company has said in a statement.

Among all aircraft manufacturers, Embraer currently has the fourth-largest yearly delivery of commercial aircraft – behind Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier.

Embraer, or Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica SA, also confirmed that it has already sold one of the propeller-driven 314-B1 Super Tucano planes to EP Aviation, a subsidiary of Blackwater Worldwide.

(Blackwater Worldwide, the world’s largest security contractor, has alternatively been referred to as a mercenary organisation by numerous reports in the international media and has been the target of arms smuggling allegations. On September 22, 2007, United States federal prosecutors had announced an investigation into whether employees of  Blackwater Worldwide illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq, that were later possibly transferred to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Kurdish Marxist-nationalist group designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union.)

Embraer is offering the United States the Super Tucano in a tender process opened by the US government, a spokesman of Embraer was quoted by the website usatoday.com as saying.

The spokesman added that Embraer has sold 99 of the 314-b1 Super Tucano planes to the Brazilian military and 25 to the air force of neighboring Colombia, mostly to fight drug trafficking along the Amazon border of Brazil and Colombia.

According to experts, a light fighter like the Super Tucano – which the Brazilian military outfits with .50-caliber machineguns under each wing – could be used to patrol Iraq’s borders with Iran and Syria.

The United States has earlier provided small planes to Iraqi’s small air force.

The Embraer spokesman said Brazilian law prohibits a private company from selling arms for use in existing conflicts, but the 314-B1 Super Tucano plane was  shipped to the United States without any armaments and was intended only for training purposes in the US.

“If the United States government decides to buy the 314-B1 Super Tucano from Embraer and requests that they be outfitted with weapons, at that point the Brazilian government would have to step in and negotiate the sale,” the Embraer spokesman was quoted as explaining. However, the news agency Associated Press reported that “neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Defence Ministry of Brazil  would comment on that assertion.”

The news agency also said that the 314-B1 Super Tucano plane was sold to EP Aviation for US $4.5 million and was delivered at the end of February 2008.