In 1935 the First Republic went looking for a site for a new military airfield and chose the Tachenberger Moor in the Enns valley of Upper Styria, below the limestone wall of the Grimming. According to the Bundesheer’s monument commission, the purchase of a 72-hectare site, largely sour, waterlogged meadows, from 49 landowners was completed in spring 1936, and construction began that autumn.

The monument commission dates the official opening of what was then called Flughafen Wörschach to December 1936; the German Wikipedia gives 1937. Both agree that the first unit was the bomber squadron of the young Austrian air arm, which moved in from Wiener Neustadt. Its equipment was a mix of Italian and German types: Caproni Ca.133 bomber-transports and Focke-Wulf Fw 58s. The monument commission also lists the Junkers Ju 52, which is not confirmed in the other sources checked.

The choice of an inland alpine valley, far from the country’s borders, fitted the defensive thinking of the 1930s. It also brought a practical problem: the ground was bog that had to be drained, and after 1945 the monument commission notes how hard the occupying troops found it to keep the drainage pumps running.

After the Anschluss in March 1938 the Austrian air arm was absorbed into the German Wehrmacht. The monument commission says the airfield was also used by Bavarian infantry and that flying training was set up there quickly. The individual Luftwaffe schools and units at Aigen are not named in the sources checked, so none is given here.

The end of the war was chaotic. The monument commission records that the evacuation shortly before the surrender in 1945 was so disorderly that the prepared demolition of the airfield was never carried out. Soviet troops used the buildings only sporadically, because civilians had already looted them; the Americans who followed struggled to keep the bog drained; and after Austria was divided into zones, the British took over.

As early as 1947 the airfield was back under Austrian administration, with a gendarmerie post on site. In late summer 1955, months after the State Treaty, flying resumed with a motor-flying school of the Interior Ministry, and in November 1955 the federal government assigned Aigen to the new Bundesheer. Infantry and then engineers were stationed there, the 1st Company of Pionierbataillon 5 from 1957 to 1967, before a helicopter squadron moved in in mid-1960.

The Alouette III did not start at Aigen. The first four, registered 3E-KA to 3E-KD, left Marignane on 27 January 1967 and flew on the next day to their new home at Linz-Hörsching, where the 1st Squadron had been based since 1958. As the French deliveries continued, the older Alouette IIs were handed to the 2nd Squadron at Aigen, according to the Truppendienst special edition published for the fly-out.

From December 1973 the Aigen squadron of Hubschraubergeschwader 2 converted from the Alouette II to the Alouette III; the last Alouette II was handed over on 9 April 1975. On 3 May 1976 the 1st Squadron moved from Hörsching to Aigen, so that both squadrons of the wing were at last in one garrison. Detachments followed the mountains: Schwaz in Tyrol from December 1968 and Klagenfurt from 1970, both closed in 2015 and reactivated on a non-permanent basis in 2016.

On 1 December 2009 a new organisation took effect and the wing became the Mehrzweckhubschrauberstaffel, the multi-purpose helicopter squadron, authorised for 16 aircraft; some Alouettes went to the air force school at Langenlebarn for training. The Bundesheer says the squadron is directly led by Air Support command and operates from Aigen and from the helicopter support point at Vomp in Tyrol.

The Truppendienst special gives a long list of the Aigen crews’ work. After Chernobyl, from 1 May 1986, Hubschraubergeschwader 2 collected food and soil samples across Austria and brought them to airfields, from where fixed-wing aircraft carried them to the Seibersdorf research centre. From September 1986 to 30 June 2001 an Alouette III at Aigen served as the emergency-medical helicopter "Christoph", flying more than 8,300 real missions and treating about 7,000 people.

Fire-fighting with local fire brigades goes back to the 1970s. The special names the 2006 forest fires at Ebensee, Taxenbach, Mötz and Pfunds, the Kranebitter Klamm fire near Innsbruck in April 2009 and the great Rax fire at Reichenau in October 2021. In June and July 1991, as Slovenia broke away from Yugoslavia, the Alouettes flew reconnaissance and liaison along the southern border.

Abroad, three Alouettes served with EUFOR in Bosnia and Herzegovina from December 2005 to December 2006, flying more than 1,100 sorties and carrying more than 2,100 people, followed by medical evacuation and liaison with KFOR in Kosovo from 2007 to 2009. Milestones were measured in hours: the fleet’s 50,000th on 30 September 1983, more than 150,000 by 2007 and about 198,000 by the end of 2023.

The base was named in 1967 after Benno Fiala von Fernbrugg, born in Vienna on 16 June 1890. The monument commission says he was the first to fit a usable radio transmitter into an aircraft, and with 29 victories in 356 combat sorties, 20 of them between February and October 1918 on the Piave front. After the war he finished his engineering degree, became personal assistant to Hugo Junkers in Dessau and rose to chief engineer of the Junkers works.

In March 1933 he was placed under house arrest with Junkers on Göring’s orders, released after three days and forced to leave Germany. In the Second World War he served as a Luftwaffe captain, finally commanding the airfield at Hörsching. He died in Vienna in October 1964.

A year after the naming the airfield went to the cinema. The German Wikipedia says the Austrian shoot of Where Eagles Dare, known in German as Agenten sterben einsam, ran from January to May 1968 in Werfen, Lofer, Ebensee and Aigen, and that the airfield scenes were filmed at Aigen in early 1968, with the Grimming as the unmistakable backdrop. EnnstalWiki says the base played the fictional "Flugplatz Oberhausen".

Austria bought the Leonardo AW169 from Italy in a government-to-government deal: the administrative agreement was signed by the defence ministers Klaudia Tanner and Lorenzo Guerini on 2 December 2021, and an option was signed on 21 December 2022, bringing the total to 36. The ministry says 12 will be operational helicopters at Aigen, which also houses the type maintenance depot, and that the AW169 replaces the Alouette III and later the OH-58. The first arrived at Langenlebarn on 13 December 2022 and was flown to Aigen about a week later, according to Austrian Wings.

Operational Alouette flying ended on 31 December 2023. At the fly-out on 24 May 2024, four Alouettes flew a last formation, one in a special livery with Leonardo da Vinci and the Grimming, ORF reported. Governor Christopher Drexler spoke of about 200 additional jobs and 40 million euros of infrastructure investment in Styria.

Costs and deliveries have moved. The ministry put the first programme at about 446 million euros in 2022; EnnstalWiki cites a 300-million-euro contract volume; Militär Aktuell gave 681.7 million euros for all 36 in June 2026. By then 11 AW169B trainers had been delivered and the armed AW169MA had slipped, with four due by October 2026 and ten each in 2027 and 2028, blamed on engine qualification and titanium supply. A simulator is running at Aigen; the new Fliegerwerft 4 buildings had not yet been started.