Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with two Moroccan maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) companies, Maintenance Aero Maroc (MAM) and Sabca Maroc, on 8 October 2026 at the Marrakech Air Show, to prepare a possible offer of its T-50 family of advanced jet trainers and FA-50 light combat aircraft to the Royal Moroccan Air Force (RMAF). The three companies said the agreement sets a framework to jointly explore business and industrial cooperation in Morocco around a T-50 market opportunity with the air force, “paving the way for further discussions and potential collaboration in support of Morocco’s aerospace and defense ambitions,” as Aviation Week reported.
The MoU is an exploratory step and not a procurement contract. Morocco has not announced a purchase of either the T-50 or the FA-50, and the RMAF’s requirement for a modern trainer and light combat aircraft remains under evaluation, according to Industrie du Maroc and La Relève.
KAI’s First Marrakech Air Show
The 2026 edition of the Marrakech Air Show ran from 7 to 10 October at the Royal Moroccan Air Force base in Marrakech. First held in 2008 and staged every two years, the show is the main aerospace and defence exhibition in North Africa, and this year drew about 200 companies from 27 countries. KAI announced on 8 October that it was the only South Korean company taking part. It was also the company’s first appearance at the event.
KAI brought its main product line, led by the FA-50 and including the KF-21 Boramae next-generation fighter, the Marine Attack Helicopter (MAH) and the MIRON armed helicopter. With the RMAF’s advanced trainer acquisition programme in mind, the company set aside a dedicated exhibition space for the FA-50, built around its ability to fly both advanced training and light combat missions in a single airframe. KAI also drew on operational data from earlier FA-50 export customers to argue its case to the Moroccan government, with the stated aim of using Morocco as a foothold for business across the rest of the continent.
During the show, KAI scheduled a series of meetings with senior government and military officials from Morocco, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. “We will actively promote KAI’s diverse products and technological capabilities, centered on the FA-50, and expand cooperation with local customers to continuously create new business opportunities,” said Kim Yong-min, Executive Vice President and Head of the Business Division at KAI.
Replacing the Alpha Jet and the F-5
The requirement KAI is chasing centres on the RMAF’s Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jets, which have handled advanced pilot training since the late 1970s, and its ageing Northrop F-5E/F Tiger II light fighters. KAI is proposing a mixed fleet of FA-50s and T-50s to replace both types, Hespress reported, and a KAI sales director said in an interview at Marrakech that the air force was interested in the FA-50 as a replacement for both fleets, according to Zona Militar. The age of the Alpha Jet fleet was brought home in August 2025, when an RMAF Alpha Jet crashed at Fez-Saïss airport during a training sortie, killing both officers on board.
The Korean jet is not alone in the contest. Leonardo is promoting its M-346 Master, which it markets mainly as an advanced trainer inside a complete training system rather than as a trainer that doubles as a combat aircraft, according to Hespress and Zona Militar.
Marrakech was not KAI’s first contact with Rabat this year. Moroccan officials discussed the FA-50 with KAI at the World Defense Show in Riyadh in February 2026, Morocco World News reported. Two weeks after the air show, on 23 October, KAI hosted Moroccan representatives at its assembly lines in Sacheon, South Korea, during its “KAI Day” event for foreign delegations, held alongside the Sacheon air show.
A Light Fighter with F-16 Lineage
KAI markets the FA-50 Fighting Eagle as a “mini F-16”, and the description has a technical basis. The T-50 was developed with Lockheed Martin, which brought aerodynamic and flight-control experience from the F-16, and the FA-50 shares much of its equipment and cockpit logic with the Fighting Falcon. For Morocco, that matters because the RMAF flies 23 F-16C/D Block 52 fighters delivered in 2011 and 2012, and the first of 25 new F-16 Block 72s made its maiden flight in South Carolina, announced by Lockheed Martin on 6 October, the eve of the air show. An FA-50 and T-50 fleet would give student pilots a lead-in aircraft closely matched to the jets they would go on to fly.
The FA-50 is a two-seat, single-engine supersonic aircraft powered by a General Electric F404-GE-102 afterburning turbofan producing about 78.7 kilonewtons of thrust. It reaches about Mach 1.5, measures 13.14 metres in length with a 9.45-metre wingspan, and has a maximum take-off weight of about 12,300 kilograms. It carries an internal 20mm three-barrel cannon and has seven hardpoints for air-to-air missiles, precision-guided bombs such as the GBU-12 Paveway II and GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), and fuel tanks. Later Block 20 aircraft add an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar and beyond-visual-range missile capability.
The T-50 family is in service with or on order for South Korea, Indonesia, Iraq, Thailand, the Philippines, Poland and Malaysia. Poland signed for 48 FA-50s in 2022 in the programme’s largest export deal, and Malaysia ordered 18 FA-50M Block 20 aircraft for about $920 million in 2023. Philippine FA-50PHs flew close air support strikes during the 2017 Marawi siege.
The Moroccan Industrial Partners
Both Moroccan partners already work on RMAF aircraft. Maintenance Aero Maroc was set up in 2022 under a strategic partnership between the Kingdom of Morocco, Lockheed Martin and Belgium’s Sabca and Sabena Aerospace, now part of the Orizio Group, to sustain the air force’s F-16 and C-130 Hercules fleets at Benslimane military airport. The company has completed the overhaul of its first RMAF C-130H, and in October 2025 it broke ground on a hangar of more than 8,000 square metres at Benslimane for heavy maintenance and modernisation of both types, due to open in the second half of 2026.
Sabca Maroc, based in the Nouaceur industrial park near Mohammed V International Airport in Casablanca, assembles aerostructure sub-assemblies and has been modernising the RMAF’s Alpha Jet fleet, Times Aerospace reported. Its work on the aircraft the FA-50 would replace gives it a direct stake in any transition. For KAI, the pairing offers a ready local base for support work, in line with Rabat’s policy of tying foreign arms purchases to in-country industry, the same approach behind Airbus’s planned helicopter MRO hub and MKU’s electro-optics and armour plant, both announced around the same show.
Korean Jets and the African Market
No African air force flies the FA-50 yet. Egypt, which operates one of the continent’s largest combat fleets, has held long-running talks with Seoul about acquiring up to 100 FA-50s, as Military Africa reported in 2025, and KAI pitched the aircraft again at EDEX 2025 in Cairo. In West Africa, Senegal was reported in 2024 to be moving towards a small FA-50 order, although no deal has been confirmed. Across the light combat and trainer segment, KAI faces Leonardo’s M-346 and the Calidus B-250, which the United Arab Emirates firm has offered to Senegal.
From Marrakech Memorandum to Moroccan Contract
The MoU gives KAI local partners and a framework for an offer, but the decision sits with Rabat, which is absorbing the cost of 25 new F-16 Block 72s, Apache helicopters and a layered air defence network under a 2026 defence budget of MAD 157.17 billion. Morocco has no published timeline for the trainer programme, and KAI has not said how many aircraft it is proposing. A Moroccan order would make the RMAF the first African operator of the FA-50 and the T-50, and with MAM and Sabca Maroc already supporting the F-16 and Alpha Jet fleets, it would give Benslimane and Nouaceur a role in sustaining the air force’s next generation of training and light combat aircraft.
