Argentina has finally abandoned plans to fly its Super Étendard naval fighter jets, decades after the aircraft played a critical role during the Falklands War.
The Armada de la República Argentina (ARA) — the Argentine Navy — is permanently retiring its Dassault Super Étendard fleet, ending years of efforts to restore the French-built strike aircraft.
The move is part of the Plan Dédalo, a five-year restructuring of Argentine Naval Aviation unveiled by the ARA’s naval aviation chief Rear Admiral Román Enrique Olivero at Punta Indio Naval Air Base on August 20.
As part of the five-year modernization initiative, the service is redesigning, relocating, and reassigning aircraft, units, people, and bases, and phasing out several other fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft.
The Super Étendard will be withdrawn from active service in 2026.
“This year will see the final retirement from active service of the Super Étendard, closing more than four decades of glorious historical trajectory and outstanding performance in the Falklands,” the Argentine government said in a press release.
The plan also states that the B-200 aircraft will be replaced by the B-360 model, the AS-555 light helicopters will be replaced by the four recently acquired Leonardo AW-109, and improvements will be made to the navigation and communications systems on 6 Mentor T-34 aircraft.
Argentina acquired 14 Super Étendards from France beginning in 1980, and these jets played a key part during the Falklands War fought between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982.
However, over time, the Argentine Navy could not maintain the aircraft amid a British arms embargo that limited access to spare parts. At the core of the maintenance crisis was the inability to replace the Martin-Baker Mk 6 ejection seats fitted to the Super Étendards.
The seats required fresh pyrotechnic cartridges, but Argentina could not obtain replacements because of British sanctions imposed after the Falklands War. As a result, these aircraft remained grounded.
Despite these constraints, the Argentine Navy continued its efforts to restore the Super Étendards.
For example, former Argentine President Mauricio Macri signed an agreement to purchase five of the aircraft during a visit to France in 2018. The French Navy decommissioned the jets as it transitioned to an all-Rafale carrier wing.
These five Super Étendards could carry 250 kilograms of GBU-49 and 125 kilograms of GBU-58 guided bombs and be outfitted with a Damocles laser designation pod.
They also had a Flightacs navigation board, a Video Rover stream transmitter, a VHF/FM radio for communicating with ground forces, and a secret Saturn HAVEQUICK radio. These aircraft—purchased for about €12.5 million, along with spare parts and support equipment—arrived in Argentina in 2019 but never entered operational service.
Over the years, Argentina considered a host of options to return the jets to the skies, including extending the life of existing components and replacing the British ejection-seat system.
It attempted local engineering tests and third-party-backed workarounds to substitute or recertify the pyrotechnics, but budget shortages and technical hurdles scuttled the efforts, and airworthiness was never achieved.
Eventually, the aging airframe encountered several other problems, including expired parachute components, engine issues, and even minor cracks—all of which severely compounded the ARA’s troubles.
Frustrated by the futility of these efforts, Jorge Taiana, the Argentine Defense Minister, formally declared in 2023 that the five SEMs would no longer be operational.
“We had planned to recover them, so I went to speak with the [French] defense minister, who told me that they cannot be recovered, for two reasons. Because of the seats, which the British did not give up, and because of a series of parts of the Super Étendard Modernisés that are now retired. Therefore, they, who had initially seen the possibility of manufacturing the parts, say that they cannot make them,” he said at the time.
Despite that, the Navy was actively working toward at least one test flight of a Super Étendard, and public reporting indicated that four main technical issues were being addressed: ejection-seat cartridges or pyrotechnics, parachute system, structural cracks, and engines. However, these efforts also proved unsuccessful.
Reports state that these aircraft haven’t taken off in a decade, if not longer, and have been kept at Espora Air Force Base in Puerto Belgrano, Argentina.
While the Argentine Air Force modernized by purchasing second-hand F-16 fighter jets, the Argentine Navy has yet to find a fighter to replace the Super Étendard. However, the service has purchased P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft from Norway.
When Super-Étendards Bombed British Warships
The Falklands are a collection of islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, around 13,000 kilometers from Britain and 500 kilometers east of the Argentine mainland.
France and Spain had colonies there at different times, but the UK seized control of the islands in 1833 and has been their custodian ever since.
The Falklands War, also known as the Guerra de las Malvinas (Argentina refers to the island as Malvinas Islands), lasted 10 weeks in 1982. It was fought over two British dependent territories in the South Atlantic: the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
On April 2, 1982, Argentina launched an invasion of the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia was invaded the following day.
However, the invasion was met with brute force, as the UK dispatched a naval task force to engage the Argentine military, and later doubled down with a large-scale amphibious assault.
The war ended in an Argentine surrender after about 74 days of fighting, and the UK was successful in wresting back control of the islands.
Nevertheless, the Falklands War produced some courageous efforts, such as Super Étendard using the AM39 Exocet anti-ship missiles to successfully target British ships.
On May 4, 1982, two Super Étendards, commanded by a Lockheed P-2H Neptune, fired Exocets at the British warship HMS Sheffield and disabled the warship.
Days later, on May 25, two Super Étendards launched a second strike, and two missiles struck the Atlantic Conveyor, a commercial ship transporting supplies and several helicopters to the front lines. The Exocets that attacked the Atlantic Conveyor were accidentally deflected by decoy chaff used by other ships as a protective measure.
Following these Exocet strikes, the Sheffield and Atlantic Conveyor both sank while being towed a few days later.
Subsequently, on May 30, two Super Étendards—one of which was carrying the country’s last surviving Exocet—launched an assault on the carrier HMS Invincible. The jets were reportedly escorted by four A-4C Skyhawks, each carrying two 500lb bombs. However, the missile was successfully intercepted and downed by HMS Exeter’s Sea Dart missile defense system.
Argentina claimed that the carrier was damaged.
Nonetheless, these French-origin aircraft made their mark when the Argentine forces were essentially overwhelmed by a much superior adversary, and their contributions continue to be remembered in the country as the final acts of its resistance during the war.
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