Mission Report · Warsaw · Rzeszów · Kraków · Gliwice · 11–15 May 2026
Chihuahua in Poland —
Aviation Valley, talent, and the aerospace investment frontier.
For five days in mid-May, the State of Chihuahua moved through Warsaw, Rzeszów, Kraków and Gliwice on a mission designed around a single industrial proposition — that Poland and Chihuahua are reading the same map from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Both are mid-sized industrial regions whose aerospace economies have been built deliberately, over two decades, on the back of technical talent rather than on subsidy auctions. The mandate we held that week, on behalf of the Government of the State of Chihuahua, was to translate that parallel into the first concrete pieces of a Polonia – Chihuahua industrial corridor. This is what we saw.
The Aviation Valley parallel.
Aviation Valley — anchored in the Voivodeship of Subcarpacia and convened from Rzeszów — is the densest aerospace production cluster in Europe. The numbers in the room were clean: 214 firms, 35,000 employees, 12,000 engineers, OEMs and tier-one suppliers integrated with regional development agencies and research institutes around a single sector identity. The mirror is precise. Chihuahua hosts the largest aerospace cluster in Mexico, with a comparable density of tier-one manufacturers, embedded engineering, and a state-level institutional counterpart purpose-built to convene them.
The comparison did not have to be argued. The Mayor of Rzeszów, the General Director of the Aviation Valley Association, and the Industrial Development Agency of Poland (ARP S.A.) framed it themselves: same vocation, same talent priority, two jurisdictions inside two of the most strategically relevant trade blocs in the world — the European Union and the USMCA. For German, Polish and pan-European tier-one suppliers reading North American supply-chain reconfiguration, Chihuahua is the operationally legible counterpart inside USMCA. For Mexican aerospace stakeholders reading European industrial integration, Subcarpacia is its mirror.
Talent as the deciding factor.
The institutional anchor of the week was the international conference Technology & People — The Future of Green Aviation, convened at the Podkarpackie Centre for Innovation by the Sectoral Skills Council for the Aviation Industry, Aviation Valley, and the Łukasiewicz Research Network — Institute of Aviation. The programme ran through European funding for sustainable aviation, the R&D agenda of the Polish industry, and the talent question that runs underneath both. Speakers included Clean Aviation Joint Undertaking, Poland’s National Centre for Research and Development, Pratt & Whitney Rzeszów and Kalisz, Safran Transmission Systems Poland, and Woodward Poland.
On behalf of the State of Chihuahua, Sergio Mancinas — Director General of INADET — closed the talent block with a presentation of the Centro Nacional de Tecnología (CENALTEC) model: how Chihuahua builds aerospace and advanced-manufacturing talent from the technical-formation and upper-secondary tier, and how that model has been adapted across the State to match the specific industrial demand of each region. The room responded.
The complementarity with the United Kingdom — presented in the same session by Andy Wells, Head of Faculty for Engineering, Aerospace & Automotive at Exeter College — was striking. The UK addresses aerospace talent through the university tier; Chihuahua, through technical formation upstream of it. The European consensus on the day was explicit: talent, not incentives, is the variable that decides where aerospace projects land. That is the same conclusion the State of Chihuahua has been building its industrial policy around for a decade.
At the close of the sessions, Michał Tabisz, President of the Sectoral Skills Council for the Aviation Industry and lead organiser of the event, took the floor to recognise the Chihuahua delegation by name — and to propose, on behalf of the Polish aerospace industry, a working visit to the State of Chihuahua in connection with FAMEX 2027. That invitation is the institutional outcome that anchors everything else.
Concrete prospects.
Three Polish counterparts emerged from the week as concrete prospects, each one mapping onto a different layer of Chihuahua’s industrial strategy.
SOLVERA — a Mexican production line, in motion. SOLVERA is a Polish manufacturer of fastening, assembly and component solutions for several industrial sectors, with an established and expanding presence in the Mexican market. Two months before the mission the company opened a commercial office in Monterrey, with a stock warehouse planned for the close of 2026. The next phase of their plan is a production line in Mexico. The technical visit on Wednesday converted a first introduction into a working conversation: SOLVERA has indicated interest in a site visit to Chihuahua to evaluate the State as the location for that line. That is exactly the kind of decision the mission was built to surface.
EME AERO — the MRO benchmark. EME AERO is the joint venture between Lufthansa Technik and MTU Aero Engines, set up in Poland to deliver maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services for Pratt & Whitney engines. Opened two years ago with roughly USD 300 million in initial investment, it is one of the most specialised MRO facilities in Europe. The plant is not currently planning expansion; the value of the visit is different. EME AERO is the benchmark for the class of project Chihuahua intends to attract next — a large-scale, European-partnered MRO operation with deep technology transfer and high-skill talent requirements. The mission produced a direct institutional channel for that benchmarking conversation going forward.
DISKUS Polska — data lifecycle for a digitalising industrial base. DISKUS Polska, based in Wieliczka in the Kraków metropolitan area, is a Polish specialist in data security and data lifecycle — certified data destruction (degaussing and physical shredding), data-centre optimisation, and LTO-tape archival services. Under its ProDevice brand, DISKUS designs and manufactures certified data-destruction equipment exported internationally to defence, government, banking, healthcare and critical manufacturing clients. The visit, brokered through the Polish Investment and Trade Agency (PAIH), is a first-look conversation in a segment that typically falls outside conventional industrial-promotion missions — but that becomes structurally relevant as Chihuahua’s aerospace, automotive, electromobility, semiconductor and industrial- robotics base digitalises. This is not cybersecurity in the general sense. It is the governance and disposal of the data that modern production generates.
Forward channel.
The forward institutional channel from this mission is concrete. At the close of the Podkarpackie conference, the Polish aerospace industry — through Michał Tabisz, President of the Sectoral Skills Council for the Aviation Industry — extended an invitation to visit the State of Chihuahua in connection with FAMEX 2027, the Mexico Aerospace Fair scheduled for April 2027 in Mexico City. The intent expressed is to attach the Polish delegation’s FAMEX participation to a technical visit in Chihuahua: industrial parks, talent-formation centres, and the supplier base. Properly staged, that visit becomes the institutional close of the corridor opened this week.
The institutional support of the Embassy of Mexico in Poland, the Polish Investment and Trade Agency (PAIH) — in particular through Patrycja Staszewska, Head of the PAIH Foreign Trade Office in Mexico City — the Municipality of Rzeszów, Aviation Valley, the Podkarpackie Centre for Innovation, and ARP S.A. carried the agenda end-to-end. That composition is what makes the channel durable beyond the mission week.
What it means for our practice.
Poland sits next to Hannover and Stuttgart in the same mandate: translate a sovereign client’s industrial strategy into international counterparts that can act on it inside the next twenty-four months. Hannover was the market-level register on the fair floor. Stuttgart was the policy-level register at the Landesbank. Poland is the cluster-level register — a direct, region-to-region match between two aerospace ecosystems that share a talent thesis. The work, in all three registers, is the same: compress the institutional distance between a sovereign mandate and an industrial counterpart so that a five-day mission produces decisions that would otherwise take twelve months.
The next round of European and transatlantic engagements is already in preparation. We intend to keep doing the work.
Closing notes.
Poland 2026 produced the first concrete pieces of a Polonia – Chihuahua industrial corridor: a Polish tier-one supplier actively evaluating Chihuahua for a Mexican production line, a European MRO benchmark with an open institutional channel, a Polish data-security counterpart for an industrial base that is digitalising fast, and an open invitation from the Polish aerospace industry to take the conversation forward in Chihuahua during FAMEX 2027.
The full Mission Report — meeting-by-meeting analysis, counterpart profiles, and recommended next steps — will be delivered to the State of Chihuahua at the close of the mission cycle.
Engagement team · LCC Strategy
On behalf of the Government of the State of Chihuahua · Mission to the Republic of Poland · 11–15 May 2026 · Warsaw · Rzeszów · Kraków · Gliwice.