On October 10, 2024, Embraer announced that its E190F E-Freighter, the Passenger-to-Freight (P2F) conversion of its popular E190 airliner, has now been certified by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
This follows the acquisition of analogous certifications from the National Civil Aviation Agency of Brazil (ANAC) in July 2024. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is expected to do the same before the end of this year.
Alongside the E190F, the FAA has also certified a cargo loading system (CLS), developed by North Carolina-based U.S. Cargo Systems for use on this aircraft.
Notably, though the E190F, launched in 2022, is Embraer’s own in-house P2F program, this is not the first P2F conversion of an E190 airliner.
In 2021, Brazilian airline Azul transformed several of its older E190s into cargo aircraft in collaboration with LHColus Technologia, an engineering firm based in Brazil and named them ‘Class F freighters’.
The urgency shown by Azul in developing its own P2F Embraer aircraft has been attributed to a boom in e-commerce and the related growth of fast parcel delivery in Brazil.
The E190 P2F program comes in response to increasing demand for cargo aircraft in this category. Plus, the progressive replacement of the airlines’ existing fleets of E190 aircraft with the new, more fuel-efficient E2 version of the type, will make many more airframes available for cargo use.
Embraer is pitching the E190F as a replacement for smaller, slower and shorter-range turboprops. In this regard, the Brazilian manufacturer claims that, in addition to the 13.5-ton payload, the E190F offers a 40% volume capacity increase, even when compared with the largest turboprops.
Embraer also claims a 30% reduction in operational costs when measured against larger narrow-body jet cargo aircraft.