Northrop F-5 F-5EM

The Brazilian Air Force was an early F-5E customer. In October 1974 it ordered 36 F-5Es and 6 F-5Bs for 72 million dollars, the first three aircraft arriving on 12 March 1975. The F-5Bs were retired in 1990 and sent to museums around the country. In 1988, to cover attrition losses and expand the fleet, Brazil bought 22 F-5Es and 4 F-5Fs surplus from the USAF aggressor inventory.

By the turn of the century the fleet needed a decision: replacement or upgrade. In 2001 Brazil chose the latter and signed a 230 million dollar, eight-year contract with Elbit Systems and Embraer to modernise 46 aircraft. The heart of the programme was the FIAR Grifo-F radar, a multimode pulse-Doppler set far superior to the original AN/APQ-159, accompanied by a glass cockpit, new avionics and modern weapons capability. The first upgraded F-5EM was delivered on 21 September 2005; the equivalent two-seaters are designated F-5FM.

In 2009 Brazil bought eleven more aircraft from Jordan — eight F-5Es and three F-5Fs — for 21 million dollars, and on 14 April 2011 signed a 153 million dollar contract to bring them to the same upgraded standard. Since 2020 the fleet has carried the Link-BR2 datalink, integrating the F-5EMs into the Brazilian Air Force command and control network.

The Brazilian logic was the Chilean one on a larger scale. A rugged, cheap-to-operate airframe, a modern radar and a datalink turn a 1970s day fighter into an acceptable air policing interceptor for a country with vast airspace and a finite budget. The F-5EM covered Brazilian air defence throughout the long process of selecting and receiving a new-generation fighter, a role no alternative would have filled at that cost.

The upgrade also extended the programme's industrial life: Embraer took part in the work, and the experience gained in integrating avionics and radar onto existing platforms fed Brazilian technical capability in later programmes.