Warsaw’s airport moved from the Mokotów field to Okęcie in 1933, and the new Central Airport opened on 29 April 1934. Military transport flying there began in the last months of the war. On 25 February 1945 the 6th Independent Transport Squadron was formed at Okęcie, with Li-2s, a few Douglas C-47s and Po-2 liaison aircraft. In 1946 it became the Government Transport Squadron. On 8 March 1947 it grew into a regiment, the Special Transport Aviation Regiment, and it took the number 36 on 1 April 1974.

The regiment’s fleet followed the Soviet bloc’s airliners. The Li-2 peaked at 17 aircraft around 1960 and the last three left in 1974. Twelve Il-12s served from 1950 to 1969 and 17 Il-14s from 1955 until 1997. Two Il-18s arrived in 1961, five An-24Ws in 1966, two Tu-134s in 1974, and the Yak-40 from 1973, of which 18 were delivered. The first Tu-154M, tail number 101, was delivered in July 1990, and the Tu-134s left service the same year.

For most of those years the regiment was how Poland’s leaders travelled by air. In 1973 it suffered its worst peacetime loss before Smoleńsk, when an An-24W crashed near Goleniów with two interior ministers on board. On 14 February 2006 the regiment was given the honorary title ’Defenders of Warsaw’. It kept that name, and the nickname ’specpułk’, until it was disbanded.

Rotary wings arrived at Okęcie on 17 May 1957, when the regiment took delivery of an SM-1, the Polish-built Mi-1, which could carry two passengers. Six Mi-4As followed in 1958 and enlarged SM-2s in 1960. On 4 November 1958 Major Paweł Tatarewicz landed an SM-1 on the roof of Warsaw’s Grand Hotel, a landing the specialist magazine Magnum-X records as a first in Europe. In March 1963 an SM-2 crashed, the unit’s first helicopter loss, and from then until 1977 the regiment flew fixed-wing aircraft only.

Mi-8s arrived in 1977 from the 37th Transport Helicopter Regiment. In 1979 three Mi-8 VIP ’salon’ helicopters, painted in the colours of LOT, carried Pope John Paul II on his first pilgrimage to Poland, and two were assigned to his visits in 1983 and 1987. For the 1991 visit the regiment took two Bell 412SPs, one of them on loan. A Bell 412HP followed in June 1993, and the Polish-built W-3 Sokół arrived the same year.

When the regiment was wound up after Smoleńsk, only its helicopters passed to the new base. By 2011 almost all the Mi-8s were over 30 years old and made up about half the helicopter fleet. They are still flying. In May 2026 the base sent two W-3WA Sokół helicopters and one Mi-8 to Lithuania to carry President Karol Nawrocki and General Marek Sokołowski to the NATO exercise Brave Griffin 26-II.

On 10 April 2010 the regiment’s Tu-154M 101 flew President Lech Kaczyński and a delegation to Katyń for the commemoration of the Katyń massacre. Smoleńsk North was in fog, with visibility reported at 400 metres. The approach system there gave the aircraft minima of 100 metres and 1,200 metres. At 10:41 local time (08:41 in Warsaw) the aircraft struck trees and the ground short of the runway. All 96 people on board were killed: sources give 88 passengers and eight crew, a figure that counts a security officer with the seven aircrew.

The dead included the President and the First Lady, Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last President of Poland in exile, the Chief of the General Staff, the commanders of the army, navy and air force, the President of the National Bank, the President of the Institute of National Remembrance, and members of both houses of parliament. Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) published its report on 12 January 2011. It blamed the crew’s failure to divert to an alternate airfield and their descent without visual contact, and said the presence of the Air Force commander in the cockpit had put pressure on the captain.

Poland’s State Aviation Accident Investigation Commission (KBWLLP), chaired by Interior Minister Jerzy Miller, reported on 29 July 2011. It found that the immediate cause was ’the descent below the minimum descent altitude at an excessive rate of descent in weather conditions which prevented visual contact with the ground, as well as a delayed execution of the go-around procedure’. Contributing factors included failure to monitor altitude on the pressure altimeter, a late response to terrain warnings, and inadequate training and preparation of the crew.

Unlike MAK, the Polish commission also found fault on the Russian side. It said the Smoleńsk controllers had given the crew wrong information about the aircraft’s position, and that the airfield’s approach lighting was defective. It did not blame pressure from the President for the crash. It was also severe on the regiment. It found that crews lacked required qualifications, that training was rushed and weather conditions falsified in training records, and that the unit had taken on more tasks than its aircraft, pilots and ground staff could handle.

After the Law and Justice party returned to power in 2015, Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz set up a subcommission in 2016 to re-examine the crash. Its report, presented in April 2022, concluded that the real cause was two explosions in the final phase of the flight: one in the wing more than 100 metres before the birch tree the aircraft was said to have hit, and a second a few metres above the ground about six seconds later.

After the change of government in late 2023, Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz dissolved the subcommission on 15 December 2023. A 19-member team led by Colonel Leszek Błach reviewed its work, and the ministry presented its nearly 800-page report on 24 October 2024. The team found that the subcommission had set out to confirm one hypothesis, an explosion, and to reject expert evidence that did not support it. It put the cost at more than 81 million złoty. That total included 34.5 million złoty in running costs and 47 million złoty for the sister aircraft, Tu-154M 102, which had been destroyed in tests.

The ministry filed 41 notices to prosecutors, 24 of them concerning Macierewicz. Macierewicz called the review ’99% lies, disinformation, and attempts to manipulate’. The dispute remains political. Prosecutors are separate from both commissions: in August 2026 they closed a ten-year treason investigation into Donald Tusk’s 2010 government, finding no evidence of intent to harm Poland. In January 2024 the ministry republished the 2011 report. It states that, under Polish law, the report remains the only binding document on the course and causes of the disaster. This page reports both inquiries and adopts neither side’s conclusions.

Defence Minister Bogdan Klich resigned when the Polish report was published in July 2011. Tomasz Siemoniak took over on 2 August, and days later the government announced that the 36th Regiment would be disbanded. Thirteen officers, three of them generals, were removed from posts responsible for flight safety and training. The regiment ceased to exist on 31 December 2011, after 66 years. Of its 320 soldiers, more than 270 stayed in the forces and 216 moved to the new unit at Okęcie.

That unit was the 1st Air Transport Base (1. Baza Lotnictwa Transportowego), formed in 2012 by merging the regiment with the 1st Air Base, also at Okęcie. At first it flew only helicopters. The government’s fixed-wing flying had already gone to LOT. On 8 June 2010 the ministry chartered two Embraer 175s, SP-LIG and SP-LIH, flown by LOT crews, for an announced 25 million złoty a year. It signed the deal without a tender.

The charter was meant to run to the end of 2013. It lasted more than eleven years. In December 2020 the Armament Inspectorate negotiated a further extension to 31 December 2021, estimated at 99 million złoty net. The reason was that the two Boeing BBJ2s due in 2020 had been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and by test and training work in the United States, France, Sweden and Poland.

The base flies from the military section of Warsaw Chopin Airport and answers to the 3rd Air Transport Wing in Powidz. Its job, in the ministry’s words, is air transport and passenger service for the supreme organs of state authority. The first new aircraft were two Gulfstream G550s, ordered on 14 November 2016 for 440.5 million złoty net. ’Książę Józef Poniatowski’ arrived on 21 June 2017 and ’Generał Kazimierz Pułaski’ followed in late July. Specialist sources give the date as either 26 or 29 July.

Three Boeing 737s were ordered on 31 March 2017 for 523.6 million US dollars. The first, a standard 737-800 with 132 seats, tail number 0110 ’Józef Piłsudski’, landed at Chopin on 15 November 2017. The two BBJ2s, 0111 ’Roman Dmowski’ and 0112 ’Ignacy Paderewski’, arrived on 7 and 29 October 2021, about a year late. The 737-800 has also flown evacuations. In October 2023 it flew into Tel Aviv during Operation Neon, which brought more than 1,100 people home from Israel in its first days.

The base’s own figures give a sense of the work: more than 8,000 departures and arrivals and over 100,000 passengers through the military airport between 2012 and 2017. Brigadier General Paweł Bigos commanded the base at its tenth anniversary on 5 October 2022 and was still in post in October 2025, when he signed an agreement with the airport operator PPL to reconfigure the military apron for full-size Code D aircraft. The helicopters remain the weak point. The Mi-8s date from the late 1970s, and no successor for the VIP helicopter fleet has been confirmed in a source this page could verify.