Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante EMB 110E

The EMB 110E is the executive version of the short-fuselage Bandeirante, derived directly from the commercial EMB 110C. Where the airliner carried fifteen passengers on simple seating, the EMB 110E offered a cabin for six to eight occupants, with an interior described in the literature as luxurious and arranged in club layout, that is, with facing seats around tables in the manner of the corporate aircraft of the period. Some sources describe it as a seven-seat executive transport, a figure that probably corresponds to the most common configuration within that range.

The appearance of an executive version is explained by the position the Bandeirante held in the Brazilian market of the early 1970s. Embraer had been founded in 1969 as a state company to produce the aircraft the Brazilian Air Force had requested in its 1965 specification: a versatile twin, cheap to operate and able to use short runways. When the civil EMB 110C entered service with Transbrasil in April 1973, it became clear that the same airframe could serve another kind of customer: corporations, state governments and large Brazilian companies that needed to move executives across an immense country with rudimentary airfields in the interior and no established business-jet network. The EMB 110E, with the sturdy undercarriage and structure of the Bandeirante, offered exactly that: a business aircraft able to land where a jet could not.

Technically the EMB 110E kept every element of the EMB 110C: the original fuselage, without the stretch later introduced on the EMB 110K and the P1 and P2 versions; the two Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-27 turboprops of 680 shp with reversible-pitch, auto-feathering propellers; the wing with integral fuel tanks and double-slotted flaps; and the aft left door with its integral air-stair. Performance was therefore that of the first generation: a cruise of about 262 mph and a range which, with few occupants and full tanks, approached the 1,379 miles Embraer quoted for the commercial model, a figure far easier to achieve in executive configuration with very little payload than in airline service. The unpressurised cabin limited comfort at altitude, a drawback Embraer would only address years later with the EMB 110P2/41 and, definitively, with the EMB 120 Brasilia.

The available sources do not state how many EMB 110Es were built, and the general literature on the type merely lists it in variant censuses as the executive version of the EMB 110C, alongside the EMB 110E(J), described as a modification of the EMB 110E with special equipment. The proportion of executive aircraft among the 494 units built between 1968 and 1990 was in any case small, because the bulk of production went to the Brazilian Air Force and to the regional airlines which, after the creation of the third-level network in 1975, made the Bandeirante the backbone of air transport in the Brazilian interior.

Even so, the EMB 110E is of historical interest for two reasons. The first is that it extended the family at an early date into a segment, corporate aviation, to which Embraer would return successfully decades later with dedicated jets; the executive Bandeirante was, in that sense, the first Brazilian series-production business aircraft. The second is that it consolidated the philosophy that characterised the whole family: a single airframe which, with changes of interior and equipment, served as military transport, airliner, calibration aircraft, aerial survey platform or executive transport. That adaptability, which the sources single out as the key to the success of the EMB 110, found in the EMB 110E one of its most direct expressions.