Bacau

Bacău is one of the few European cities of 136,087 people whose industrial future still depends on keeping fighter jets, airliners, and rocket launchers in service. That is the real story hiding behind its bland county-capital label.

Officially, Bacău is the main city of Bacău County in Moldavia, sitting at 165 metres on the Bistrița corridor. The city is smaller than it was two decades ago, dropping from 175,500 residents in 2002 to 136,087 at the 2021 census. On a standard map of Romanian urban decline, Bacău should look like a retreat story. Instead, it has kept a high-value industrial niche that many larger cities would struggle to build from scratch.

The reason is Aerostar. From its headquarters in Bacău, the company now holds approvals to maintain Boeing 737 aircraft, Boeing 737 MAX jets, the Airbus 320 family, and components for commercial aviation, while also serving as Romania's designated F-16 maintenance centre. In May 2024, Aerostar and Lockheed Martin opened Europe's first certified HIMARS sustainment centre in Bacău. That means a city better known abroad as a waypoint in eastern Romania now sits inside NATO's repair architecture. The hidden advantage is not mass manufacturing. It is the ability to preserve, diagnose, and return expensive machines to service faster than rivals. This is the after-sale economy in its pure form: clients pay Bacău to reduce downtime, avoid replacement costs, and keep critical systems mission-ready.

That is path dependence in its useful form. Bacău inherited aviation infrastructure, technical labour, and defence-grade routines from an earlier industrial era, then carried them through a political and market phase transition instead of letting them decay. Niche construction matters because once those maintenance capabilities existed, the city could attract adjacent work in civil aviation, military aviation, and missile-system support. The result is an economy built less on making new objects than on staying indispensable after sale.

The closest organism is the octopus. An octopus survives through dexterity, problem-solving, and precise control rather than brute scale. Bacău does the same. Its strategic value comes from specialist hands, difficult certifications, and the ability to keep complex systems alive when failure is expensive.