Andøya Air Station lies beside the fishing town of Andenes at the northern tip of Andøya, the outermost island of the Vesterålen archipelago in Nordland. Store norske leksikon records that NATO proposed a military airfield here in 1951 and that the Storting authorised it in 1952; construction was paid for with NATO common funds. The logic was geographic: from Andenes an aircraft is almost immediately over the deep water of the Norwegian Sea, on the route Soviet submarines from the Kola Peninsula had to take to reach the Atlantic.

The Wikipedia articles on the station, used here only as finding aids, say the first aircraft, a Douglas DC-3, landed on 17 September 1954 when only part of the runway was finished. Store norske leksikon and Forsvarets forum both give 1957 as the year the air station opened. From the 1950s until 1994 it also had air defence artillery, and the army kept units nearby through the Cold War, according to Store norske leksikon; the Norwegian Wikipedia article places them at a dispersed camp at Skarsteindalen, activated in 1959.

The base changed the island. Store norske leksikon notes that Andøy’s population grew by 26 per cent between 1950 and 1971, largely because of the military at Andenes, and then fell by 43 per cent between 1971 and 2021. It remains the municipality’s largest employer. The airfield has always been shared with civil traffic: the first scheduled flight, an SAS Metropolitan, arrived on 2 April 1964, and Widerøe has flown Twin Otters and their successors here since 1972.

The runway figures do not agree. Store norske leksikon describes a 2,440 m concrete main runway and a 1,670 m asphalt crosswind runway, opened in 1968 because of the harsh winds and closed in 2015; English Wikipedia gives 2,468 m; the current AIP, used in the summary row, lists 1,989 m for runway 14/32. The AIP figure may be a declared distance rather than the paved length, but that could not be checked in this run.

333 Squadron, formed in wartime Britain as a Norwegian maritime squadron, came to Andøya from Sola with Grumman HU-16B Albatross amphibians. The date is disputed: Store norske leksikon and the English Wikipedia squadron article give January 1963 for its permanent stationing, while the Norwegian Wikipedia article gives December 1961. The Albatrosses gave way to Lockheed P-3 Orions; Forsvarets forum reported in 2023 that the first P-3 arrived in 1968, while Store norske leksikon and a later Forsvarets forum article give 1969.

For more than half a century the Orions flew long patrols over the Norwegian and Barents Seas, tracking submarines and surface ships and supporting the Coast Guard. The English Wikipedia squadron article says the original P-3Bs were replaced from 1989 by P-3C Update III aircraft and two P-3Ns; that detail is not confirmed by an official source consulted here. By 2021 five P-3s were operating, and the squadron formed part of 133 Air Wing together with maintenance, base and staff elements.

In May 2021 Forsvarets forum counted about 400 people inside the fence: 210 full-time posts, about 60 conscripts and about 50 in fire, rescue and airfield services. That spring the squadron was preparing to move. Its new commander from 1 August 2021, Per Jørgen Tiller, had served at Andøya from 2007 to 2012 and trained on the P-8 in the United States.

The P-8 Poseidon took over at Evenes. Norway’s first, Viking, landed there on 24 February 2022, and on 30 June 2023 the Orions flew their last mission. Six P-3s were retired. Four were put up for sale, two of them flown to storage in the United States, and two in poor condition were left at Andøya. One of those, Vingtor, was earmarked to be shipped by sea to the Norwegian Aviation Museum in Bodø.

The long-term defence plan of 2016, Kampkraft og bærekraft, proposed that 333 Squadron move to Evenes with its new aircraft and that “Andøya flystasjon legges ned”: Andøya Air Station is to be closed. The idea was to gather the maritime patrol aircraft and the quick reaction alert fighters on one base. The foreign affairs and defence committee reported on 11 November 2016 and the Storting voted for closure that month.

The decision was fought locally for years. A campaign group, Bevar Andøya flystasjon, chaired by Hilde Flobergseter, won a Storting hearing on 16 January 2018 after, in her words, a year and a half of fighting against the wind. The Centre Party made the base a national issue, but when the Labour and Centre Party government took office in October 2021 its Hurdal platform kept the closure. Party leader Trygve Slagsvold Vedum conceded that the Centre Party had not won that point, and the government offered Andøy a development fund of NOK 250 million instead.

The human cost was felt most at Haugnes, the village the airfield had absorbed. Forsvarets forum reported in 2021 that nearly 300 people had been moved off their land over about two decades from 1955; the Norwegian Wikipedia article gives 310 residents and 72 buildings. Geir Bringsli, whose family came from Haugnes, told the paper it felt as if they had been sacrificed for nothing. The price of the move also grew. By April 2022 the estimate for the new base at Evenes had risen to as much as NOK 8 billion, against an original NOK 5.2 billion, according to NTB.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed the calculation. In April 2022 Finance Minister Trygve Slagsvold Vedum announced that Andøya would become a permanent base for receiving allied forces, saying it was so well located. The runway would stay open, but the airport-operator role would pass to the state airport company Avinor from summer 2023, with Forsvaret keeping guard, fire and rescue and ground support during the transition. Store norske leksikon records Avinor running a purely civil airport from August 2024.

On 2 February 2024 Defence Minister Bjørn Arild Gram and US Ambassador Marc Nathanson signed an addition to the Supplementary Defence Cooperation Agreement. Andøya Air Station was one of eight new agreed areas, bringing the total to 12, where the United States may build infrastructure and have unimpeded access. This is an allied arrangement on a Norwegian base, not a US base.

Two months later, on 3 April 2024, the government reversed the closure outright: Andøya would become the base for a new national fleet of long-range maritime surveillance drones, using the facilities the P-3s had left. Forsvaret’s own service page still describes the station as in a development phase and a future drone base.

That plan lasted two years. On 27 March 2026 the revised long-term plan cancelled the national long-range drones. The Chief of Defence, General Eirik Kristoffersen, said such drones were simply too vulnerable in a high-intensity war, but promised that Forsvaret would stay heavily present at Andøya. Norwegian personnel are instead to train on British MQ-9B drones in cooperation with the United Kingdom, and the mayor, Kjell Are Johansen, said he was very disappointed.

Eight years of planning for closure left their mark. In June 2025 Forsvarets forum reported that large parts of the manoeuvring area had been closed because concrete and asphalt, some of it about 70 years old, had started to break up. The station commander, Øystein Dahlberg, said that from 2016 to 2024 the base had been maintained just enough to keep the wheels turning, and that nobody dared continue when loose concrete could be sucked into an engine. Propeller aircraft such as the Hercules could still use it; jets were restricted.

The consequences reached NATO. In November 2025 the planners of Cold Response 2026 dropped Andøya and moved the allied flying to Bardufoss and Evenes. Defence Minister Tore O. Sandvik told the Storting in writing that the move would not reduce the scale of the exercise.

In December 2025 the paper reported that allied requests to land were being refused every week. Repairs were scheduled for the southern part of the runway in 2026, the northern part in 2027 and the arrester system in 2028, and a proper perimeter fence not before 2032–2034, even though more than NOK 620 million had been allocated in budgets from 2022 to 2025. The crosswind runway had been closed for about ten years with no plan to reopen it.

The air station’s neighbour is Andøya Space, founded in 1962 as Andøya Rocket Range. Its first rocket, Ferdinand 1, was launched on 18 August 1962 and reached 102 km, the first instrumented rocket in Europe to study the polar ionosphere, according to Store norske leksikon. Forsvaret lists support for Andøya Space among the station’s tasks. The company’s test centre runs a sea range of 1,850 km2 in and beyond Andfjorden, and the Royal Norwegian Air Force tested the Penguin Mk3 anti-ship missile there from 1986 to 1993. In October 2021 the government agreed to part-fund a satellite launch base at Andøya Space.

The waters off the island are now used for allied weapons trials. On 3 September 2025 a US Air Force B-2 dropped a QUICKSINK anti-ship weapon off Andøya in a test with four Norwegian F-35s and a P-8. In May 2026 about 2,500 personnel from Norway, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, with eight ships, held the live-fire air and missile defence exercise Mjølner off the island.

The space activity has drawn security attention too. In May 2026 the Norwegian Police Security Service arrested a Chinese national on Andøya in a case concerning a planned satellite receiver; High North News reported that the case concerned the space activity rather than the air station.