The airfield did not start as a Polish base. After the German annexation of Greater Poland, work began in 1940 on the Flugzeugfabrik Focke-Wulf Posen-Kreising, an aircraft plant with its own airfield between the villages of Głuszyna and Krzesiny on the south-eastern edge of Poznań. The Kronika Miasta Poznania, the city chronicle, says the plant built Fw 190 fighters and worked on the Ta 154, and that it employed about 7,000 people.

The United States Army Air Forces came for it in 1944. The local history site Polot lists raids on 9 April and 29 May; the city’s own sources concentrate on the second, on Whit Sunday, when B-17s dropped nearly 100 bombs and destroyed workshops, hangars, aircraft and the runways. The 2009 chronicle puts the damage at 85 per cent of the buildings. It also credits Edward Sikora, a radio operator of the Polish underground from Ostrów Wielkopolski, with passing target information by secret radio.

After the Battle of Poznań ended on 23 February 1945, the Red Army took over the airfield in March. The Soviet 836th Bomber Aviation Regiment arrived from the Leningrad area with Tu-2 bombers, and on 16 April 1945 its squadrons flew from here to the Seelow Heights, the last big German line before Berlin. Sources disagree on when the Soviets finally left. The municipal history dates the handover to the Polish army to 1954, while Polot records a Polish fighter regiment, the 11th, moving in from Ławica as early as April 1951.

Krzesiny became a fighter base in September 1954, when the Ministry of National Defence ordered the formation of the 62nd Fighter Training Regiment. Polot says it was formed from the 2nd squadron of the 11th Fighter Regiment. It became a regular fighter regiment, the 62. Pułk Lotnictwa Myśliwskiego, in 1957 and joined the national air defence system. In 1958 it took the name of the Greater Poland insurgents of 1918–1919. Sources differ on the date of the naming: 6 September or 13 October 1958.

The regiment worked through the Soviet fighter generations. It began with MiG-15s and their Polish licence-built versions, the Lim-1 and Lim-2, then received the Lim-5 in 1958 and MiG-19P and MiG-19PM all-weather interceptors in 1959. The MiG-21 arrived in 1962 after the airfield was rebuilt. The city chronicle says a further rebuild in 1966 forced the regiment to move out for a while, first to Babimost and then to Żary.

The fighter years cost lives. The accident lists compiled by Polot and by local historians name at least six airmen of the 62nd regiment and its successor killed in MiG-21s between 1963 and 1992, the base commander among them. After the end of communist rule the regiment was renamed the 3rd Fighter Regiment in 1994, and in 1999 it absorbed the 17th squadron from Ławica, Poznań’s other military airfield. On 1 January 2001 it was reorganised as the 31st Air Base (JW 1156) and the 3rd Tactical Air Squadron, which went on flying MiG-21s until 2003.

Poland chose the F-16 in December 2002 and signed for 36 F-16C and 12 F-16D Block 52+ jets on 18 April 2003, beating the Gripen and the Mirage 2000-5. Krzesiny had already been chosen to receive them. The decision to build a NATO-standard F-16 base came in 2001, and on 12 July 2002 a new runway and apron were formally opened. Under the plan, Krzesiny got 32 jets and Łask the remaining 16. How many F-16s are at Krzesiny today is not published.

The first aircraft landed on 8 November 2006 after flying the Atlantic with air-to-air refuelling. President Lech Kaczyński formally received them the next day, and the first lady, Maria Kaczyńska, named the type Jastrząb (Hawk). The first three Polish pilots finished their US conversion in June 2006: Brig. Gen. Dariusz Malinowski, Col. Rościsław Stepaniuk and Lt Col Zbigniew Zawada. Polska Zbrojna reports that 18 pilots had been trained in Poland by the end of the first year. Głos Wielkopolski says the last three of the 48 jets arrived in December 2008.

The pilots came mostly from MiG-21s, and the change was bigger than the new aircraft. Code One, Lockheed Martin’s magazine, described MiG-21 sorties of 20 to 40 minutes with limited avionics. The F-16 brought long missions, air refuelling and NATO procedures. The 3rd squadron at Krzesiny ran Poland’s own basic F-16 course, and its first class graduated in 2010, the year Polish F-16s took over Quick Reaction Alert. The 6th squadron, which had moved to Krzesiny from Powidz in 2006, passed its NATO force evaluation in September 2011. The two squadrons were combined under the 31st Tactical Air Base in 2008.

The 6th squadron is Krzesiny’s tiger squadron. Poland first took part in a NATO Tiger Meet in 2011, the association’s 50th anniversary year. The ministry says the squadron became a full member of the NATO Tiger Association in 2014 after winning the title of best flying squadron. Since then it has flown the association’s exercises and competitions, most recently Tiger Meet 2026 at Araxos in Greece, hosted by the Greek 335 Squadron.

In May 2018, the centenary year of Polish independence, the squadron brought the Tiger Meet to Krzesiny, the first one ever held in Poland. From 14 to 25 May, 22 flying squadrons from 13 nations flew about 70 aircraft, 10 helicopters and a NATO AWACS from the base: F-16s, Eurofighters, Rafales, Gripens and Tornados, plus Gazelle, Puma and Merlin helicopters. The ministry called it the Polish Air Force’s biggest undertaking of the year, with more than 2,000 personnel.

The same squadron gave rise to the F-16 Tiger Demo Team Poland. It was formed in 2015 and first performed that September at the base’s anniversary celebrations. Greek display pilots of the Zeus team trained the first Polish pilots. The team flies an ordinary front-line F-16C Block 52+ in tiger-striped paint. Capt. Robert Głązka was its first display pilot. Maciej Krakowian took over in spring 2023, and sources give the date as late April or May.

The team’s run ended in grief at Radom on 28 August 2025. Krakowian, by then a major and team leader, was killed while rehearsing for the 18th Radom International Air Show, and the show was cancelled. His was the first fatal accident in almost two decades of Polish F-16 flying. Military prosecutors and the state accident commission are both investigating.

Krzesiny sits inside the city limits of Poznań, and the arrival of the F-16 brought the base into court. On 17 December 2003 the Wielkopolska voivode set up a restricted-use area around the airfield (Regulation No. 50). Owners inside it could claim compensation for lost property value. Once the F-16s started flying in 2006, Głos Wielkopolski reported protests by residents who did not want to live with the noise.

The claims grew fast. Głos Wielkopolski reported that owners in the zone sought nearly 280 million złoty. By early 2013 about 500 cases had cost the military roughly 39 million złoty, and some 200 more were pending. In a 2008 case (II CSK 367/08) the Supreme Court ruled that owners did not have to prove that the flying was unlawful, because liability for aircraft operations is liability for risk.

The courts then split. A 2008 change in the law moved the power to create such zones from voivodes to regional assemblies. The Supreme Administrative Court ruled in 2009 and 2010 that the 2003 regulation had therefore lapsed, while the Supreme Court and the ordinary courts went on treating it as valid. By the end of 2019 the question was before the Constitutional Tribunal. Głos Wielkopolski reported that only about 1,500 of the roughly 4,500 residents entitled to compensation had filed a claim.

Krzesiny’s F-16s were on quick-reaction duty when Russia invaded Ukraine. Lt Col Łukasz Gradziński, commanding the 6th squadron, told Polska Zbrojna that 24 February 2022 had started quietly, with no alpha scramble during the day. Then the alarm sounded at around four in the morning, and from that point the jets were in the air non-stop. Continuous air patrols along the eastern border followed.

The base had already been used to test American plans for flying from dispersed airfields. From mid-July to mid-August 2018 it hosted the US Air Forces in Europe’s first Deployable Air Base System exercise, with US Air Force, Air National Guard and US Army personnel. In April 2021 F-15Es and F-15Cs of the 48th Fighter Wing from RAF Lakenheath flew into Łask and Krzesiny for an Agile Combat Employment exercise.

The most visible allied presence has been Norwegian. Four Royal Norwegian Air Force F-35As from the 132nd Air Wing at Ørland landed at Krzesiny on 8–9 January 2025 under a Polish-Norwegian agreement of December 2024. They flew on NATO’s integrated air and missile defence mission, guarding among other things the Rzeszów-Jasionka hub through which aid reaches Ukraine. On the night of 15 January 2025 two of them scrambled during a Russian missile attack on Ukraine. The first rotation ran into the summer, and a second one of four aircraft and about 100 personnel arrived in early October 2025.

Polska Zbrojna described Norwegian F-35s and Polish F-16s working together from the same apron. Lt Col Michał Zloch, commanding the 3rd squadron, put it colloquially: on joint missions, he said, the F-35 is the one that breaks the door down. That was a preview of Poland’s own fifth-generation future. The first Polish F-35 squadron is forming at Łask, not Krzesiny, and Krzesiny’s next step is the F-16V upgrade, signed in August 2025 for about 3.8 billion dollars net and due at WZL-2 in Bydgoszcz between 2028 and 2038.