The track is the strangest thing at Holloman and the oldest thing still working. It opened in 1950 as a 3,500-foot rail built to launch Snark cruise missile sleds, and it has been lengthened repeatedly since; the Air Force now describes it as running roughly ten miles, with the base’s own data sheet giving 50,788 feet and calling it the longest and fastest facility of its kind anywhere. The 846th Test Squadron, part of the 704th Test Group, runs it. What makes it valuable is not the length but the precision: the rails are continuously welded and surveyed to a tolerance no other track matches, and the instrumentation slices every second into ten thousand pieces so that engineers can see exactly what happened to a test article microsecond by microsecond.

The work is unglamorous and relentless. Sleds carry ejection seats, warheads, missile seekers, radomes and guidance sets; more than a thousand ejection tests have been run over the years. Rain and ice erosion, particle impact and fuzing all get tested here because a sled can be recovered afterwards and a flight test usually cannot. From 5 October 1982 the squadron began enclosing sections in a helium-filled tube, since helium is roughly a seventh the density of air and lets a vehicle go faster for the same push. A world land speed record above Mach 7.3 was set on 18 December 1969; another followed on 30 April 2003, with Holloman citing 6,453 mph, or about Mach 8.5, for a railed vehicle. Since July 2021 the squadron has been running a Hypersonic Sled Recovery programme, and it claims to be the only sled track in the American defence establishment able to recover a test article intact from speeds above Mach 5.

Stapp arrived at Holloman in 1953 to direct its deceleration projects, already carrying sixteen rocket sled runs from Muroc Dry Lake and a personal tolerance of about 35 g. On 10 December 1954 he strapped into Sonic Wind I. Forty thousand pounds of thrust pushed the sled to 632 mph in five seconds, about 20 g on the way up, and then water brakes took it all away in 1.4 seconds at a peak of 46.2 g. He came off the sled with bruising, blisters and temporary blindness, and said the sensation in his eyes was something like having a molar pulled without anaesthetic. His sight came back. The Air Force never sent another human being down the track.

The point of the run was not the record. Stapp was establishing that a crew member ejecting at 35,000 feet at twice the speed of sound could survive the windblast and the deceleration, and the numbers he brought back went straight into escape system design. They also went somewhere he cared about more. Stapp had spent years arguing that the same forces killed far more Americans on the highway than in the air, and in 1955 he founded the automobile safety conference that still carries his name. He was in the room when President Johnson signed the Highway Safety Act of 1966, which required seat belts in new cars from 1968. He received the National Medal of Technology in 1991 and died at Alamogordo on 13 November 1999, aged eighty-nine. Sonic Wind No. 1 survives, under restoration at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center for its Nation of Speed gallery.

The wing traces to the 49th Pursuit Group, constituted on 20 November 1940 and activated at Selfridge Field on 15 January 1941. It was among the first American combat units sent to the South West Pacific after Pearl Harbor, defended Australia from February 1942, and finished the war credited with 678 enemy aircraft destroyed, more than any other fighter group in that theatre; Richard Bong scored 22 of his 40 victories with it. Korea, France and Spangdahlem followed. The 49th reached Holloman on 1 July 1968 with 72 F-4D Phantoms, a deployment that won the 1969 Mackay Trophy, converted to the F-15 in 1977, and became simply the 49th Wing on 25 June 2010.

Today it teaches. The 54th Fighter Group activated at Holloman on 11 March 2014 as a detachment of the 56th Fighter Wing at Luke, which needed its ramp back for the F-35A; roughly 800 airmen moved across to New Mexico, and the group now holds the 8th, 311th and 314th Fighter Squadrons flying the F-16. The remotely piloted side came first, arriving on 23 October 2009, and has grown into the larger half of the base. The 49th Operations Group fields the 6th, 9th and 29th Attack Squadrons alongside the 16th Training Squadron, which centralises the simulator phases and has graduated more than 600 students a year since 2009. The syllabus runs about three months across four phases, from transition through basic surface attack to two kill chain blocks. Aircraft on the ramp carry the tail code HO. The installation covers 59,639 acres at 4,093 feet and supports around 21,000 people.

Because Holloman holds the largest MQ-9 pipeline anywhere, allied air forces send their crews to it rather than build their own. The Royal Netherlands Air Force had students at Holloman from 2018 and established permanent party staff in January 2024, embedding Dutch instructors inside the 6th Attack Squadron so that a Dutch student and an American student complete exactly the same syllabus. France, Spain and Italy also train there as guest nations, the aim being that NATO Reaper crews share equipment, procedures and technical language rather than merely a specification.

The British thread is older and more tangled. The Royal Air Force describes Holloman as the largest remotely piloted aircraft training establishment in the world and ran its Reaper aircrew training there in parallel with the General Atomics flight test and training centre in North Dakota, before advanced work with No 39 Squadron at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. United Kingdom specific instruction, covering rules of engagement and national procedures, had been the job of No 54 Squadron’s Reaper Training Flight until that task was absorbed into No 39 Squadron. In 2020 the RAF restructured the whole pathway ahead of the Protector entering service, putting a six-week ground school and basic operations course at Grand Forks up front so that it could control timelines and syllabus content directly. The British presence at Holloman was real and substantial, but it sat inside a chain since rearranged around the newer aircraft.

Germany has trained aircrew in the United States since 1958, and the reasons were always geographic. The Federal Republic is small, crowded and frequently overcast; New Mexico offers enormous supersonic airspace, hundreds of clear flying days and live ranges next door at White Sands. The German Air Force Flying Training Center moved to Holloman in 1992 and settled in as a full establishment of six units: a training group, a Tornado training squadron, a logistics group, first and second line maintenance squadrons and a supply squadron. It ran basic weapons system courses, instructor courses, the fighter weapons instructor course and advanced tactical training for Tornado crews, and for a quarter of a century German fighter-bombers were an ordinary sight over Alamogordo.

Germany decided to bring the mission home, and the ending was drawn out. German Tornado and Holloman F-16 crews flew their last joint mission on 17 August 2017, with the detachment due to complete its move by the middle of 2019. The wider German footprint in the region outlasted it only slightly: the German Air Force Air Defense Center at Fort Bliss, whose liaison staff was established on 9 November 1957 and which trained generations of Patriot crews, cased its colours on 17 May 2022 and closed at the end of that June. Fort Bliss National Cemetery does hold German graves, but they belong to an earlier chapter: twenty-two German prisoners of war reburied there in 1946, and a German civilian scientist who had worked at Fort Bliss during the war, a reminder that the rocket teams who fired V-2s over White Sands were quartered there too.

The Nighthawk came out of the shadows and into Holloman on 9 May 1992, the fleet leaving its secretive Tonopah home for an ordinary Air Combat Command base with a public gate. The 8th Fighter Squadron, the Black Sheep of the 1941 group, flew it alongside its sister units. F-117s deployed for Operation Southern Watch through the 1990s, went to Europe for Operation Allied Force between February and July 1999, and opened Operation Iraqi Freedom on the night of 19 March 2003. Allied Force also gave the 49th a distinction nobody wanted: it is the only unit ever to lose a stealth fighter to enemy action.

Retirement came quickly once the decision was made. A ceremony was held at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson on 11 March 2008, another at Holloman on 21 April, and a farewell at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works at Palmdale on 22 April; retired Colonel Jack Forsythe led a four-ship on the final sortie west. Of a fleet of some fifty-plus airframes, a handful went to museums and the rest were flown to the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada and put into what the Air Force called recallable storage rather than scrapped, which is why Nighthawks have gone on being photographed in the desert long after their official end. The F-22A Raptor replaced them at Holloman, making the 49th the only active Air Force wing to have operated two different stealth types; the last Raptors left for Tyndall in April 2014. In June 2024 the 8th Fighter Squadron painted an F-16 black and grey in tribute.