Kalamata lies at the head of the Messenian Gulf in the south-west Peloponnese, with the Taygetos range rising to the east. According to the Hellenic Air Force’s own history of the 120 Air Training Wing, construction of the airfield began in 1960 as an alternative NATO air base, a reserve runway for an alliance that expected to need dispersal fields in a war. Wikipedia’s airport article gives 1959 as the year the airport opened; the two dates probably describe different stages, and neither source explains the gap.

For most of the 1960s Kalamata had no resident flying unit. In 1968 the Air Force set up the Kalamata Air Detachment under the 117 Combat Wing at Andravida, further up the coast, and began expanding the airfield so that cadets of the Hellenic Air Force Academy could fly here. The academy itself stayed at Dekelia, north of Athens; Kalamata became its airfield, far from the crowded airspace around the capital and with the open sea to the south.

In March 1970 the 120 Air Training Combat Group was formed. In May 1970 the 362 Advanced Air Training Squadron moved in with Lockheed T-33 jets and cadet flying began in June; in May 1971 the 361 Basic Training Squadron followed with Cessna T-37s. In May 1977 the 363 Operational Training Squadron arrived from Larissa with T-2E Buckeyes, and in August 1977 the group was raised to the 120 Air Training Combat Wing. The wing’s motto, in ancient Greek, translates as “I wish I were an eagle, flying high.”

For three decades a Greek fighter pilot’s path ran through the same small fleet. The T-37 taught basic jet flying; Wikipedia lists eight T-37Bs and 24 T-37Cs in Greek service. The Lockheed T-33 served as the advanced trainer until the North American T-2E Buckeye arrived between February 1976 and January 1977. The 50th flying class was the first to switch to the Buckeye, and the T-33 was retired from training.

The T-2E was a Greek export version of the US Navy’s carrier trainer, with two General Electric J85 engines, and 40 were built for Greece. It turned out to be one of the longest-serving aircraft in the Air Force. The T-37 lasted until October 2002; the Air Force says 361 Squadron’s T-37 flying was suspended “after 39 years”, which counts the type’s Greek service from before it came to Kalamata.

Its replacement was the Raytheon (now Beechcraft) T-6A Texan II turboprop. The first arrived from Wichita, Kansas, in August 2000 and the 76th flying class began training on it in September 2001. Greece bought 45: Wikipedia lists 25 standard T-6As and 20 T-6A NTA, an armed version able to carry rocket and gun pods. On 22 February 2006 the 364 Air Training Squadron was formed and the others were redesignated Air Training Squadrons. By 2019, according to figures Wikipedia attributes to Flightglobal Insight and Air International, cadets flew about 60 hours on the T-6 and 70 on the T-2 before graduating with about 150 hours.

By the late 2010s the T-2E fleet was more than forty years old and, according to The Aviationist, fewer than ten of the 40 were still airworthy. Three crashes in six years were reported in the Greek press. On 3 January 2018, according to Keep Talking Greece, a T-2 came down two nautical miles south of Kalamata airport; both crew ejected at about 800 ft and were picked up by an Air Force helicopter. The Air Force blamed a mechanical failure, and reports said both engines had stopped.

On 28 August 2018 a T-2 from the wing crashed near the village of Kollines, north of Sparta, in rain. Keep Talking Greece reported that one crew member ejected and was taken to hospital in Kalamata in good condition, while Major Nikolaos Vasiliou, 37, a pilot with more than 2,500 flying hours, was killed. The then defence minister, Panos Kammenos, declared three days of mourning.

On 27 December 2023, at 11:28, a T-2E of the 363 Air Training Squadron crashed on its return to base, half a nautical mile north-west of the airport, and its pilot was killed, according to the Air Force statement reported by To Vima. The paper reported claims that an explosion occurred on board just before the crash; no investigation finding was found for this page. The accident came seven months after the M-346 arrived to replace the Buckeye.

Greece’s answer to its ageing trainers was to buy training as a service. In January 2021 Elbit Systems announced it had been selected for a USD 1.68 billion flight training programme; The Aviationist reported the contract as EUR 1.375 billion over 22 years, or about EUR 62.5 million a year. The package covered ten new M-346 advanced trainers, leased rather than owned but in Greek markings, new simulators, logistic support and the maintenance and restoration of the T-6 fleet.

The agreement was signed at the 120 Air Training Wing on 16 April 2021, according to Keep Talking Greece; Wikipedia gives May 2021. The Ministry of National Defence said it gave “a final solution to the chronic problem of the training of the pilots of the Air Force with satisfactory adequacy of flight hours”. Wikipedia says the centre opened in October 2022 with 14 T-6s, and that all ten M-346s had been delivered by September 2025; neither date was confirmed from an official source for this page.

The first two M-346s, numbers 250 and 251, left Leonardo’s Venegono factory, refuelled at Lecce-Galatina and landed at Kalamata on 11 May 2023. Twenty Greek technicians had trained in Italy and six instructors in Israel on the Israeli Air Force’s M-346. The Air Force received them in a ceremony on 16 May 2023. The contract allows more than 3,500 M-346 flying hours a year, and the centre is meant to sell spare places to foreign air forces.

The centre is the largest single project of the Greek-Israeli defence relationship. At the first M-346 landing, defence minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos called it “the biggest agreement and the most strategic project in the field of defense cooperation between Greece and Israel to date”, and Breaking Defense still cited it in August 2026 as an example of that cooperation when Greece signed for an Israeli air defence system.

It was not uncontroversial. In September 2022 the opposition leader Alexis Tsipras objected to the cost of the Elbit contract and said a SYRIZA government would renegotiate it, arguing: “I find it unthinkable that while we give 14 billion euros for equipment, we do not take care of the basic needs of the human potential.” SYRIZA did not return to government in 2023, and the programme went ahead.

The model is not unique. Italy runs a comparable International Flight Training School with the M-346 at Decimomannu, and its commander told The Aviationist in 2023 that the two schools would not compete, since demand for advanced training was far greater than the places available. The criticism in Greece was about the cost of the contract; nobody quoted here disputed that the T-2E needed replacing.

Kalamata’s best-known international story was not about flying. In November 2001 fourteen aircraft enthusiasts, twelve British and two Dutch, were arrested after an open day at the air base and accused of espionage, which could carry a 20-year sentence. After six weeks in custody they were released on bail of GBP 9,000 each and the charge was reduced to the misdemeanour of illegal information collection.

In April 2002 a court found them guilty: eight were sentenced to three years and the rest to one year. On appeal all were acquitted; Wikipedia dates the acquittal to 2003, and the contemporary BBC reports it cites could not be retrieved to confirm the date. BBC News covered the verdict at the time, reporting that the spotters had “ignored warnings”, the headline of its report of 25 April 2002 as cited by Wikipedia.

The base shares its runway with Kalamata International Airport. Wikipedia says the airport opened to charter flights in 1986, got a new terminal in 1991, came under the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority that year and was renamed after the shipowner Vassilis Constantakopoulos in 2012. An Instrument Flight Training Center of the wing has operated on the western side since 1976. Civil traffic was 278,961 passengers in 2018, and summer jets now mix with trainers in the circuit.