The Clutch Stations are among the more revealing artefacts of early Cold War planning. When the Royal Air Force needed bases in West Germany in the early 1950s, it put them as far west as the map allowed — Geilenkirchen, Wildenrath, Brüggen, Laarbruch and Nörvenich, clustered near the Dutch border, because everything further east was expected to be overrun in the first days of a war. The land at Nörvenich was offered by the North Rhine-Westphalian government on 11 June 1952, a survey party of fifty began work on 2 September, and construction started on 15 June 1953.

It was not popular. About seven hundred people marched in Bonn against the project on 1 July 1953, a fortnight after the diggers arrived, and seventy Bavarian loggers were brought in two weeks later to clear the woodland. West German rearmament was still a live political fight in 1953, the Paris Treaties were two years away, and an airfield in the Rhineland farmland was a visible piece of it. The first British jets landed in August 1954.

The handover came quickly. RAF Germany passed the airfield to the federal defence ministry in December 1955, and on 8 December an administrative office for the 1st training company of the new air force opened at Nörvenich — which German accounts call the birth of the West German Luftwaffe. Theodor Blank, the first defence minister, attended a second oath-taking ceremony there on 2 January 1956. The first German aircraft touched down on 13 January 1958 with Major Gerhard Barkhorn at the controls.

Oswald Boelcke was born on 19 May 1891 and died on 28 October 1916, aged twenty-five, with forty aerial victories. He was not the highest scorer of the First World War and he did not live to see the war’s second half. What he did was think. In the summer of 1916 he was given the job of forming Jagdstaffel 2, the German air service’s first dedicated fighter squadron, and of working out how single-seat fighters should actually be used — a question nobody had systematically answered.

The answer, finalised in early October 1916 at the request of Oberst Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen and distributed across the Luftstreitkräfte, was the Dicta Boelcke: eight rules, the world’s first tactical air combat manual. Secure the advantage before attacking and keep the sun behind you. Always carry through an attack once begun. Fire only at close range. Never lose sight of your opponent. Attack from behind. If he dives on you, turn to meet him. Over enemy lines, never forget your line of retreat. And, for the squadron, attack in fours or sixes and make sure several of you do not go for the same man. Take away the period language and most of that is still in a modern syllabus.

He was killed by his own side’s aeroplane. Chasing British machines near Bapaume on 28 October 1916, Boelcke and his friend Erwin Böhme both pulled up to avoid a third aircraft; Böhme’s undercarriage clipped Boelcke’s upper left wing, the fabric tore, and the Albatros spiralled down. He was not wearing his crash helmet and his belt was unfastened, and he died of a fractured skull. The Royal Flying Corps flew over and dropped a wreath: "To the memory of Captain Boelcke, our brave and chivalrous opponent". He was buried at Dessau on 2 November.

He had also recruited Manfred von Richthofen into Jagdstaffel 2, which is why the two names that survive in the modern Luftwaffe are the two that belong together. And that is the point about the tradition question here. The 2018 Traditionserlass rules that the Wehrmacht as an institution is not worthy of tradition, but allows individuals to be admitted after a careful case-by-case examination. Boelcke is not a Wehrmacht case at all: he died in 1916, seventeen years before the National Socialists took power, in a war whose German air service is a separate institution from both later ones.

That is why Boelcke and Richthofen have survived where Mölders did not. The wing at Neuburg lost the Mölders name in 2005 because Mölders flew for Franco with the Legion Condor; there is nothing equivalent in Boelcke’s record, and the Bundeswehr has said so in public more than once. It does not make the question comfortable — Jagdstaffel 2 was renamed Jagdstaffel Boelcke after his death and the name was carried again by a Luftwaffe bomber wing in the Second World War — but it is a defensible position, and it is worth stating the reasoning rather than simply putting the name on a page.

Jagdbombergeschwader 31 was the first German wing to receive the F-104 Starfighter, in the autumn of 1961, and it was declared operationally ready on the type on 20 June 1962. The first German losses had already happened by then.

On 19 June 1962, the day before that declaration, four F-104F two-seat trainers of the wing crashed near Kerpen-Balkhausen during a rehearsal for the wing’s ceremonial presentation. All four pilots were killed. The formation had descended in cloud and flew into the ground together, in the way that formations do when the leader is wrong and everybody else is holding station on him. The Luftwaffe banned formation display flying across the service afterwards.

It was not an isolated event but the loudest early note in what became the Starfighter crisis. Nörvenich’s wing alone has lost thirty-three pilots over its history, eighteen of them on the F-104. Across the Luftwaffe the figures were far worse, and the aircraft acquired the nickname Witwenmacher, widow-maker, in the German press. The argument about the cause — an American point-defence interceptor pressed into a European all-weather low-level strike role, with inexperienced aircrew, inadequate training and, at first, an ejection seat that fired downwards — ran for a decade and fed into the Lockheed bribery inquiries of the 1970s.

Three years after the crash the wing produced the opposite kind of story. In 1965 Hauptmann Heltzel collided in mid-air with a Dornier Do 28 and brought his damaged F-104G back to a landing at 435 kilometres per hour, an approach speed that the 1988 Guinness Book of Records listed as the fastest landing ever made. Both stories belong to the same aeroplane.

At 14:38 on 23 June 2014 a Eurofighter of Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 31, 30+91, collided with a Learjet 35A, D-CGFI, near Olsberg in the Sauerland. The Learjet came down about a hundred metres from houses. Both its crew were killed. The Eurofighter pilot, flying a badly damaged aircraft, landed at Nörvenich; the second Typhoon of the pair diverted to Cologne Bonn.

The exercise they were flying is the heart of the matter. The Learjet, operated by GFD Gesellschaft für Flugzieldarstellung from Hohn, was playing a hijacked airliner that had gone silent on the radio; the two Eurofighters were practising the national renegade response — exactly the scenario the alert pairs at Neuburg and Wittmund exist for. The lead Typhoon intercepted, the Learjet turned to follow it, and the two aircraft hit each other.

The Bundesstelle für Flugunfalluntersuchung published its final report in August 2015. The immediate causes were an insufficient appreciation of collision risk and the Learjet crew losing sight of the Typhoon during a steep turn. The systemic findings were harder: the division of tasks between the participants was inadequately regulated and the risk analysis for the renegade training exercise itself was insufficient. Two civilian pilots under contract died practising a drill designed to protect civilian passengers, and the inquiry found the drill had not been properly thought through.

Nörvenich has a 2,439-metre runway, forty-five metres wide, capable of taking an Antonov An-124, and it has capacity to spare. That makes it the Luftwaffe’s utility field in the west. It is the standing diversion airfield for the NATO E-3A Component at Geilenkirchen, twenty-five minutes away by air, and for Büchel.

It also takes visitors. Eighteen F-105 Thunderchiefs of the United States Air Force Reserve’s 301st Tactical Fighter Wing — fourteen from the 457th squadron at Carswell in Texas and four from the 465th at Tinker in Oklahoma — deployed here for exercise Coronet Poker from 12 to 27 August 1977. More striking, and far more recent: from 17 to 28 August 2020 six Israeli Air Force F-16C/D Barak fighters of the 101st and 105th squadrons, with two Gulfstreams, two Boeing 707 tankers, a C-130 and around 180 personnel, flew from Nörvenich for exercise Blue Wings 2020. It was the first time Israeli combat aircraft had ever landed in Germany. The following year the wing led the German contribution to Blue Flag in Israel, and the Inspekteur der Luftwaffe, Generalleutnant Ingo Gerhartz, flew over Jerusalem.

The biggest guest was German. Twenty-five Tornados of Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 33 moved here from Büchel in June 2022 so that Büchel’s runway could be rebuilt for the F-35A, and they stayed four years, flying the nuclear-role wing’s whole programme from a borrowed base. Nörvenich reactivated an old noise-suppression hall to run them. The first aircraft flew home on 15 and 16 June 2026.

What is at Nörvenich now, after all that, is its own wing and nothing else: about thirty Eurofighters of TaktLwG 31 "Boelcke", 907 soldiers and 226 civilian staff, plus a civil sports flying association that uses the field at weekends. The wing passed 50,000 Eurofighter flying hours on 31 August 2026 and marked it with a commemorative logo on a fin — roughly 1,667 hours per aircraft over nearly seventeen years, or about a hundred hours a year each, a figure that says a good deal about German fleet availability without anybody having to editorialise.