On 11 June 1909 Wiener Neustadt’s council voted to build an “Aeroplan-Halle” for about 2,500 kronen to promote mechanical flight, and levelled some five square kilometres of meadow north of the town instead of building runways. On 17 November 1909 the area was declared an airfield. The town’s own history page calls it the field the council laid out “to promote mechanical aviation”, and English sources describe it as the first airfield in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Igo Etrich rented two hangars here in 1909 and went on developing the Taube, the dove-winged monoplane that Lohner in Austria and Rumpler in Germany later built under licence and in which an Italian airman dropped the first aerial bomb over Libya on 1 November 1911. His works pilot Karl Illner, who had gained Austria-Hungary’s third pilot’s licence on 24 April 1910, took off from Wiener Neustadt on 17 May 1910 and flew to Vienna and back: the first Austrian cross-country flight.

Flying meetings followed. The German Wikipedia records three competitions in 1910, some attended by Emperor Franz Joseph, and an international meeting on 18 September 1910 at which bad weather kept Illner aloft for only 22 seconds while Adolf Warchalowski managed 2 minutes 13 seconds. The town’s own history page dates Austria’s first aviation week at the field to 1911; the two accounts may describe different events and are both given here.

In 1911 the army bought its first Etrich Taube training aircraft, and 16 field pilots were trained at Wiener Neustadt that year, according to the German Wikipedia. The Bundesheer’s monument commission records that Eduard Nittner, born in Görz on 5 February 1885, was posted in 1911 to the first military flying course of the k.u.k. Flugmaschinen-Instruktionsabteilung on the Wiener Neustadt field and received his pilot’s diploma that November.

On 3 May 1912 Nittner took off from Wiener Neustadt for Graz and crossed the Semmering pass in poor conditions, a landmark flight in the Alps. He also used the field as the starting point for an attempted flight to Linz. On 17 February 1913, by then an Oberleutnant, he was killed at Fischamend when the wing of a new Lohner Pfeilflieger broke shortly after take-off and the aircraft fell from 100 m. The air base at Graz-Thalerhof later carried his name.

In 1913 the army leased the whole Wiener Neustadt field. Three hangars had housed the first k.u.k. military aircraft, and the Parseval airship also landed here, the German Wikipedia records. Within a few years the flying field that the town council had built for enthusiasts had become the training ground of an imperial air arm, and the war that followed would bring factories and an acceptance depot as well.

The First World War turned Wiener Neustadt into an aircraft-building town. The Oesterreichische Flugzeugfabrik AG, Oeffag, was founded here in 1915 and built C I and C II two-seaters, seaplanes and, above all, licence versions of the German Albatros D.II and D.III fighters. The army also placed its third aircraft acceptance group, Flars No. III, at Wiener Neustadt, where new aircraft from the factories were inspected before going to the front; it later moved to the Anatra plant in Odessa.

Oeffag obtained its D.III licence in autumn 1916 and began deliveries in May 1917. It built the type in three series, 53, 153 and 253, with Austro-Daimler engines of 185, 200 and 225 hp, and strengthened the wings with thicker ribs and spar flanges to cure the failures that plagued the German original. Sources disagree on the total: about 526 aircraft by one count and 586 by another. Godwin von Brumowski, the leading Austro-Hungarian ace, flew the type.

Defeat ended it all. Under the Treaty of Saint-Germain the Allies ordered the destruction of what the German Wikipedia describes as several hundred aircraft and several thousand aero engines, together with Oeffag’s hangars and workshops. Austria was forbidden a military air arm, and the field where Austrian aviation had begun lost its purpose for a decade. Aircraft only returned in 1929, and then just as visitors from a flying school in another province.

The field returned to use in 1929 as an outlying landing ground of the Graz flying school, according to the German Wikipedia. The rebuilding of an Austrian air arm, forbidden by the peace treaty, then brought it back into military use. In 1934 the ministry moved officer training back into the historic castle of Wiener Neustadt, the Theresian Military Academy, as the Bundesheer’s Truppendienst journal records, and an academy squadron was stationed in the surviving Kaiser-Karl-Fliegerkaserne on the airfield.

In 1936 the defence ministry bought the site and made it a non-public military airfield. New hangars, workshops and a control tower were built, and squadrons flew the Italian Fiat CR.32 fighter from here. An aerobatic squadron based at Wiener Neustadt took second place at the military world championships in 1937, the German Wikipedia records; the event and ranking have not been confirmed in an official source.

Wiener Neustadt appears on the list of Austrian Air Force aerodromes of 1938, alongside Aspern, Zeltweg and Graz-Thalerhof. The German Wikipedia adds that a bomber squadron also flew from here before moving to Aigen im Ennstal in 1937. That short revival ended in March 1938, when the Anschluss absorbed the Austrian air arm into the Luftwaffe. The hangars, workshops and tower built in 1936 became the starting point for the Luftwaffe’s rapid expansion of the field.

The Luftwaffe expanded the field quickly. Kampfgeschwader 76 was formed at Wiener Neustadt on 1 May 1939 from the staff of KG 158, with its staff flight and I. Gruppe training on the Dornier Do 17 through that summer before the Polish campaign; II. Gruppe arrived briefly on 22 September 1939. On 13 March 1938 a Berlin holding company had taken over a local aviation company and renamed it Wiener Neustädter Flugzeugwerke, WNF.

WNF became one of the main Messerschmitt Bf 109 producers, with up to 15,000 workers and 8,545 aircraft by 1945, about a quarter of all Bf 109s; the town says it already supplied a quarter of production in 1940. That made the town a target. The first US raid on 13 August 1943 was followed by more than 30 attacks by one count and 29 by another, the last on 1 April 1945.

The German Wikipedia’s article on the raids, based on Markus Reisner’s 2014 study, gives nearly 3,000 bombers, more than 800 civilians killed, nearly 10,000 people made homeless, 101 bombers and 50 escorts shot down and some 400 Allied aircrew killed. Of 4,178 buildings, 40 per cent were destroyed and only 18 escaped damage; the town’s own history page speaks of around 50,000 bombs. Flying continued until March 1945.

Soviet troops occupied the field in early April 1945 and kept it as a base throughout the occupation. From 1950 they equipped it for jets with landing lights and instrument landing aids, and MiG-15s were the main type, the German Wikipedia records. Meanwhile Austrian glider pilots, allowed to fly gliders again from 1949, smuggled hidden sailplanes out of the Soviet zone to the west.

On 15 August 1955, after the State Treaty, the airfield passed to the Republic. The new Bundesheer declined to base aircraft here, to spare a population traumatised by the bombing and because the field lay so close to the Iron Curtain, and civil clubs took over. The army returned in 1961, mainly for parachute training. Today the Air Support Wing runs an airfield command here, and the Jagdkommando special forces are based in the Flugfeld-Kaserne.

The AIP lists Wiener Neustadt/West (LOXN) as a military aerodrome of the Federal Ministry of Defence, with four grass runways, the longest 1,620 m, military flying Monday to Thursday 0700–1500 and Friday 0700–1100 UTC, and civil gliding, powered flying, parachuting and model flying outside those hours. In September 2018 the field hosted a round of the Red Bull Air Race. It is not the civil Wiener Neustadt/Ost aerodrome (LOAN) nearby.