CASA

CASA was constituted in March 1923 and began work in May 1924, when the Getafe factory opened to build Breguet aircraft under licence; the first order covered 26 Breguet 19 A.2s and total production of the type reached 400. In 1926 it built a second plant at Cádiz to make the German Dornier Do J Wal flying boat: seventeen for the Spanish military air arm, twelve for naval aviation and two for commercial use. In 1929 it presented the CASA-1, the first aeroplane designed in house, and in 1930 King Alfonso XIII visited the main factory. The Getafe lines also produced two Breguet XIX aircraft modified for long-distance flights that became famous: the Jesús del Gran Poder, which in 1929 flew from Seville to Bahia covering 6746 kilometres in 43 hours and 50 minutes with captains Ignacio Jiménez and Francisco Iglesias at the controls, now preserved at the Cuatro Vientos air museum, and the Cuatro Vientos, which in 1933 took Mariano Barberán and Joaquín Collar to Havana. In 1932 the firm obtained a Vickers licence for 25 Vildebeest torpedo bombers with Hispano engines.

The Civil War left the Getafe works in the Republican zone; production was moved out of Madrid and another plant was opened at Sabadell, returning to Getafe when the conflict ended. In those years CASA built the Soviet Polikarpov I-15 biplane fighter, completing 287 of them. After the war it opened a new factory at Tablada, in Seville, with German licences: 25 Gotha Go 145As as the CASA 1.145, 25 Bücker Bü 133s as the CASA 1.133 and 555 Bücker Bü 131s as the CASA 1.131, whose production ran until the late fifties. In 1940 it began licence manufacture of 200 Heinkel He 111 bombers, designated CASA 2.111 and fitted with imported Rolls-Royce Merlin engines; decades later those Spanish machines stood in for Luftwaffe He 111s on film.

From 1943 the Spanish state began investing in the company with a 33 % stake, which it enlarged until it controlled 99.2 % by 1992. In 1945 it opened a factory in Madrid for parts and sub-assemblies, working until 1982, and in 1946 it re-established the projects office to design aircraft with its own technology again: the firm had become a builder of other people's licences with no design capacity, and that decision reversed the trend. Maintenance was the other leg of the business: in 1957 it won the contract to support the American F-100 Super Sabres deployed in Europe and Turkey — a programme that raised its technical standing — along with overhaul of the Spanish Air Force's T-33s, and in 1962 it started licence production of the Northrop F-5A fighter. In 1971 it absorbed Hispano Aviación, becoming the country's leading aerospace company, and in December 1972 it did the same with the national aero-engine company. The projects office produced the C-201 Alcotán, C-202 Halcón and C-207 Azor transports and, above all, the C-212 Aviocar and its successors the CN-235 and C-295; in 1977 it was awarded the contract to design and build the C-101 trainer and attack aircraft.

In 1972 CASA joined the Airbus consortium as a full member alongside France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and in 1996 it entered the Eurofighter programme. In 1999 it became part of EADS with France's Aérospatiale-Matra and Germany's Dornier GmbH and DASA, the Spanish branch taking the name EADS-CASA; the European group was formally constituted in July 2000. In July 2001 one of the four Eurofighter Typhoon final assembly lines started up at Getafe — the other three in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy — with the right wing of every production aircraft built in Spain and the assembly of the Spanish Air Force's 87 aeroplanes, the first delivery arriving in the second half of 2002. Airbus Military was formally created in April 2009 by integrating EADS CASA's military transport aircraft division, which then employed around 7500 people; with the C-212, CN-235 and C-295 the group became the world leader in light and medium military transport, with some 650 aircraft flying for more than a hundred operators. On 24 July 2014 the company adopted its present name, Airbus Defence and Space S.A.U., and in December 2022 it moved its registered office to Getafe, to the street named after the Aviocar.