Foggia was chosen because of the weather and the ground. The Tavoliere is flat, dry and large, and in the autumn of 1943 the Allies turned it into a complex of airfields from which heavy bombers could reach targets that were out of range from England. Amendola was one of them, and it filled quickly: the P-47 Thunderbolts of the 57th Fighter Group from 27 October 1943, the B-25 Mitchells of the 321st Bombardment Group from 20 November, and from 16 January 1944 the B-17s of the 97th Bombardment Group, which stayed until October 1945.

The 97th had a particular pedigree. It had opened the American strategic bombing campaign in Europe on 17 August 1942, when its B-17s hit the marshalling yards at Rouen on the first heavy bomber mission flown by the Army Air Forces from England. From Amendola it flew the long missions the Fifteenth Air Force existed for, and it took Distinguished Unit Citations for Steyr on 24 February 1944 and for Ploiesti on 18 August 1944. The 2nd Bombardment Group, which also used Amendola, had flown 412 missions by 1 May 1945.

The British were here too. Wellington Xs of 330 Wing flew from Amendola between February and July 1944, and Liberators of 240 Wing from 4 July 1944 to 25 August 1945. The field also became a base of the Balkan Air Force, the mixed Allied formation that supplied and supported Yugoslav and Greek partisans, and which included aircraft and crews of the Italian co-belligerent air force flying for the side they had been bombing eighteen months earlier.

The scale of the thing is easy to underestimate now. In the final offensive of 9 to 18 April 1945, the Fifteenth Air Force put 1,233 bombers into the air from the Foggia fields in support of the American Fifth and British Eighth Armies pushing into northern Italy. Amendola’s runway and dispersals were built for that traffic, which is a large part of why the airfield is as big as it is today.

On 15 March 1950 three de Havilland Vampires landed at Amendola. They were the first jet aircraft the Aeronautica Militare had ever owned, and the choice of airfield was practical rather than ceremonial: Amendola had length, space and good weather, and nobody nearby to complain about the noise. North American F-86 Sabres followed, and the conversion nucleus turned into the air force’s advanced jet flying school.

For the next forty years Amendola was where Italian fighter pilots learned to fly fast. The school flew the Fiat G.91T among other types, and in 1986 it was reorganised as the 60ª Brigata Aerea. It is a period that tends to be skipped over because training bases do not generate headlines, but a generation of Starfighter and Tornado crews passed through this runway before going anywhere else.

The school’s end came on 1 July 1993. The 32° Stormo, reconstituted at Brindisi-Casale in September 1967 and flying the Fiat G.91R and then the G.91Y, moved to Amendola with the 13° Gruppo, absorbed the brigade’s two flying squadrons and disbanded it. Amendola stopped being a school and became an operational base, which is what it has been ever since.

The re-equipment followed at once. The G.91Y was retired in 1995 and the wing converted to the AMX, the small Italian-Brazilian attack aircraft; the 101° Gruppo joined as the operational conversion unit on 31 July 1995. Over the type’s whole Italian career the AMX fleet flew about 240,000 hours, of which some 18,500 were operational, before the last four aircraft were retired from Istrana in April 2024.

The AMX had been designed as a battlefield attack aircraft for a European war that never came, and its first shooting war was Kosovo. During NATO’s Operation Allied Force in 1999 the Italian contribution flown under the national name Ghibli was based at Amendola, with nineteen AMX on the ramp and about ten held ready at any time.

The aircraft came from the 13°, 14°, 103° and 132° Gruppi, with pilots drawn from the 101° Gruppo conversion unit at Amendola. The 13° Gruppo, commanded during the campaign by Lieutenant Colonel Gustavo Cicconardi, did most of the flying. Missions were mostly daylight, about two sorties a day per crew, flying close air support and offensive strike with Opher infrared-guided bombs, free-fall Mk 82s and, late in the campaign, GBU-16 laser-guided bombs.

The Italian AMX flew 252 sorties in the Kosovo campaign. What the aircraft was good at was the unglamorous part: it was accurate, it was cheap to fly, and it could stay over a target area for a useful time. An Italian pilot later reported an American telling him that "we need only AMX and A-10 to win this war" — a compliment about endurance and payload rather than performance.

Afghanistan was the type’s longest war. Between 2009 and 2014 Italian AMX flew close to 10,000 hours on about 3,000 missions there, mostly reconnaissance and armed overwatch, and the type also served over Libya in 2011 and in the Kuwait-based anti-Daesh effort in 2016. The fleet ended its career at Istrana, but Amendola is where it first went to war.

Italy bought six General Atomics Predators in 2002. They were delivered from 2004, entered service in January 2005, and were flown from Amendola by a remotely piloted aircraft group formed on 1 March 2002, which on 1 February 2005 took the number and traditions of the 28° Gruppo. At that point almost nobody in Europe outside the United Kingdom had an armed-capable medium-altitude endurance aircraft in service.

The squadron went operational almost immediately. Italian Predators flew over Iraq during Operation Antica Babilonia from 2005, over Afghanistan from 2007 — where they had logged more than 6,000 flight hours by the end of that year — over Kosovo, and over Libya during Operation Unified Protector in 2011. The larger MQ-9 Reaper, called Predator B in Italian service, arrived from 2010, and a detachment has been maintained at Ali Al Salem in Kuwait since 2014.

The politics were slower than the flying. Italian Reapers operated unarmed for years while the question of arming them went through Rome and Washington; the two additional MQ-1C ER airframes delivered on 22 December 2015 were bought partly to replace an aircraft lost in 2010. The original Predator fleet was finally withdrawn on 19 December 2022, leaving the Reaper as the squadron’s aircraft.

Amendola also grew the institutional side of the business. The Centro di Eccellenza APR, the air force’s remotely piloted aircraft centre of excellence, sat here until it moved to Frosinone on 15 June 2026 to become the core of the new 66° Stormo. What remains at Amendola is the operational squadron, which is the part that actually flies over other people’s countries.

On 12 December 2016 two F-35As landed at Amendola, assembled at Cameri and flown to the 13° Gruppo. No other European base had the aircraft. Italy had committed early and heavily to the programme, had built the only assembly line outside the United States, and had decided that the first squadron would go to the base with the longest experience of introducing new types.

The milestones came quickly. From 1 March 2018 the F-35As began contributing to national air defence surveillance. On 30 November 2018, during the media day of the Tactical Leadership Programme course 18-4 at Amendola, the air force declared initial operational capability for the 13° Gruppo. Ten F-35As had been delivered; eight were with the squadron at Block 3F standard and two were at Luke Air Force Base for training. It made Italy the first air arm in Europe to declare a fifth-generation aircraft operational.

Then came the deployments. In October 2019 six Amendola F-35As spent three weeks at Keflavik on NATO’s Icelandic air policing mission, the first time any ally had used the F-35 for NATO air policing. Italy went back in 2020 and again in 2022, when the detachment was certified for 24-hour scramble duty at the end of April. Amendola also hosts Falcon Strike, the multinational fifth-generation exercise; in June 2021 Israeli F-35I Adirs flew from here alongside Italian, American and British aircraft.

The F-35B arrived into an argument. Italy ordered 90 aircraft, 60 As and 30 Bs, and split the Bs fifteen and fifteen between the air force and the navy — a division the navy disliked, its former chief of staff Admiral Luigi Binelli Mantelli publicly arguing in La Stampa that the short take-off variant was expensive and belonged at sea. The air force’s case was runways: for every strip usable by a conventional fighter there are perhaps ten shorter ones a STOVL aircraft could use. Its first F-35B reached Amendola on 22 February 2020, and on 1 July 2025 the 101° Gruppo was reactivated on the type.