BRAVO Symposium 2025: Embraer—Redefining the Future of Air Mobility
BRAVO Symposium 2025: Embraer—Redefining the Future of Air Mobility
CEO Francisco Gomes Neto traces the trajectory of the Brazilian aviation company in a leadership conversation with AS/COA Vice President Brian Winter.
Speakers:
- Francisco Gomes Neto, President & CEO, Embraer
- Brian Winter, Editor-in-Chief, Americas Quarterly; Vice President of Policy, AS/COA (moderator)
Brazilian aviation powerhouse Embraer emerged out of a project training the next generation of aviation engineers, recalled Francisco Gomes Neto, the company's president and CEO. At the 2025 Council of the Americas Symposium. He spoke with AS/COA's Brian Winter about how this focus on education and innovation has continued to service the company's resilience and growth since its founding in 1969. Gomes Neto is 2025 recipient of the BRAVO Transformational Leader of the Year award.
Gomes Neto noted that just in the last 30 years, Embraer has certified 30 new aircraft models. In the United States alone, he added, Embraer jets currently transport around five million passengers every month. What are the essential factors to keeping this network of operations afloat? Gomes Neto outlined five key "cultural behaviors": integration across the company's departments, more responsibility for financial results among senior management, honest dialogue and feedback, a passion for the business, and, what he called "addressing complexity with simplicity."
For Gomes Neto, who took the helm of the aviation company in May 2019, these principles helped guide the business through the COVID-19 pandemic along with "a focus on doing the basic things in an extraordinary way," he said. Other key elements to Embraer's success were agility, simplicity, and trust that the business model could adapt when needed.
The aviation executive concluded by sketching plans for Embraer's mid- and long-term growth, including the development of an electric-powered aircraft.
