The 31st Fighter Wing arrived at Aviano on 1 April 1994, having inactivated the same day at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, and took on the 510th Fighter Squadron and the 555th Fighter Squadron with Block 40 F-16s. The 510th carry the Buzzards name; the 555th are universally the Triple Nickel. Both remain, now flying the F-16CM, and between them they are the entire permanently based American fighter force south of the Alpine watershed.

That geography is the whole argument for the base. Every other USAF fighter wing in Europe sits north of the mountains, which adds tanker legs, transit time and weather risk to any mission aimed at the Mediterranean rim. From Aviano the Adriatic is minutes away and the Balkans, the central Mediterranean and the approaches to North Africa are all within practical reach. The wing states its mission plainly — secure the base, generate combat airpower, ready to deploy and fight from home — and stresses agile combat employment, dispersing to austere airfields rather than concentrating on one vulnerable ramp.

The wing is more than its fighters. The 31st Operations Group, which manages over 970 people, controls the two fighter squadrons, the HH-60W rescue squadron, the Guardian Angel squadron, an air control squadron and an operational support squadron, and oversees a geographically separated MQ-9 unit in Romania. The 731st Munitions Squadron sits at Camp Darby in Tuscany. In July 2025 the post itself was downgraded: Brigadier General Tad Clark handed over to Colonel Beau Diers on 11 July, the last general officer to command the wing.

The legal reality of Aviano is easy to miss and worth getting right. The airfield belongs to Italy and is commanded by an Italian Air Force officer. Its formal name is the Aeroporto Pagliano e Gori, after two Caproni bomber airmen, Maurizio Pagliano and Luigi Gori, whose loss in the First World War the Aeronautica Militare commemorated a century later at the end of December 2017. The Italian Comando Aeroporto describes its task as supervising the bilateral agreements covering the American units deployed there, keeping the general airport services running, and providing technical and logistic support.

In practice this produces an unusual double structure. The Americans run their own flying, maintenance, munitions, medical and support organisations through the 31st Fighter Wing, and the ramp, shelters and much of the built infrastructure are American- or NATO-funded. But the airfield itself, its sovereignty and the framework under which foreign forces use it remain Italian. The Aeronautica Militare has called Aviano the flagship of United States Air Forces in Europe while pointedly keeping national command of the ground it stands on.

The arrangement has a large civilian dimension too. The base is among the more significant employers in the province of Pordenone: a union coordinator told Stars and Stripes in 2024 that about 760 Italians work there, some for four decades, and disputes over job cuts and pay have periodically spilled into strikes. American service families live dispersed in rented housing across the surrounding comuni rather than behind a fence, which makes the relationship with local councils an active, negotiated thing.

Aviano is among the oldest military airfields anywhere. The Aeronautica Militare records that the field was established on the Friuli plain in 1911, its first commander formally taking up the post on 19 April that year, placing its origins at the very beginning of Italian military aviation. During the First World War it was a front-line base: the Italian Air Force notes that some of the earliest aerial combat actions on record were flown from here, that the ace Francesco Baracca trained at the field, and that it became home to Caproni bomber squadrons.

Between the wars the field was absorbed into the new Regia Aeronautica and expanded. In the Second World War it was used first by the Italians and then, after the 1943 armistice, by the Luftwaffe, which made it a significant airfield in the German defence of northern Italy. That made it a target. Allied bombing wrecked the place; by 1945 it had been pounded into near-uselessness, and it passed into British hands at the end of the war.

The Italians brought it back into service in 1947, and the modern chapter opened with the NATO-era agreements of the mid-1950s. American units began rotating through, and for the rest of the Cold War the base was a forward operating location rather than the permanent home of a fighter wing. That changed only in 1994, when the collapse of Yugoslavia turned a useful Italian airfield with good access to the Adriatic into the most important piece of NATO real estate in southern Europe.

NATO fired its first shots in anger from Aviano. On 28 February 1994, enforcing the United Nations no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina under Operation Deny Flight, American F-16s intercepted a formation of Bosnian Serb light attack aircraft near Banja Luka and shot several of them down. SHAPE records this as the first combat action in NATO’s history, forty-five years after the Alliance was founded. The fighters came from the 526th Fighter Squadron, then operating from Aviano; the 31st Fighter Wing did not activate at the base until five weeks later.

What followed was a decade of escalating commitment. Across Deny Flight the 31st Fighter Wing flew 1,644 sorties over 471 days of no-fly-zone enforcement and close air support for United Nations forces on the ground. When the campaign turned from policing to bombing, Aviano was the launch point. NATO opened Operation Deliberate Force in the early hours of 30 August 1995 with a series of precision strikes, and calls it the Alliance’s first air campaign; the wing’s own heritage account credits it with 418 sorties in twenty-two days, while the 31st Operations Group fact sheet cites a much larger figure for the group as a whole.

Kosovo in 1999 was of a different order again. Between March and June, during Operation Allied Force, the 31st Fighter Wing flew nearly 9,000 combat sorties and close to 40,000 hours of combat flying; the 555th passed 1,000 sorties on 27 May. Aviano’s single runway carried a tempo far beyond anything the base was built for, with reinforcement aircraft packed onto a field that in peacetime supports two squadrons. It is the campaign that defines Aviano in institutional memory.

On 3 February 1998 a US Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler, an electronic warfare aircraft from a Marine squadron deployed to Aviano, was flying a low-level training route through the Val di Fiemme in Trentino. Above the town of Cavalese it struck the haul cable of the Cermis cable car. The cable parted, the cabin fell to the valley floor, and all twenty people aboard were killed. There were no survivors. The aircraft, badly damaged, returned to Aviano. Those facts have never been in dispute.

Almost everything afterwards was. Italian prosecutors sought to try the crew, but the case went to American military justice rather than to an Italian court. In March 1999 the pilot, Captain Richard Ashby, was acquitted by a court-martial of charges arising from the deaths, and the corresponding charges against the navigator, Captain Joseph Schweitzer, were dropped. Both were then prosecuted over a videotape shot aboard the aircraft in flight, which Schweitzer destroyed. Schweitzer pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and conspiracy and was dismissed from the Marine Corps without imprisonment; Ashby was convicted on similar charges and in May 1999 sentenced to six months’ confinement, dismissal and forfeiture of all pay.

The acquittals were received in Italy as an injustice, and the case became a standing grievance about the terms on which foreign forces operate on Italian soil. Compensation took years to settle, passing through both the Italian parliament and the United States Congress. Five years on, Stars and Stripes found the bitterness in Cavalese undiminished, residents convinced that procedural violations had been glossed over. Within the military the practical consequence was a hard tightening of low-level flying rules in Italy.

The base a visitor sees today is largely the product of one enormous building programme. Aviano 2000 was conceived to bed down two permanent F-16 squadrons on a field designed for rotational use, and it ran for well over a decade. United States Air Forces in Europe reported NATO contributions of 395 million dollars to the Air Force and 12 million to the Italian Air Force, alongside 174 American projects estimated at 138 million dollars. It produced dormitories, a communications centre, schools and child care, a medical treatment facility described as the single largest NATO-sponsored project, and the flightline utilities that sustain continuous fighter operations.

The geography stayed awkward regardless. Aviano sits on the plain immediately beneath the Piancavallo massif, the southern rampart of the Dolomites, and the mountains rise abruptly a short distance north of the field. The base weather instruction notes the consequence: those mountains block radar returns from storms developing over them, and the portable Doppler radar on Area F cannot see storms within five to ten nautical miles because of its own cone of silence. Crews work with a known blind spot in the direction the weather usually comes from.

The layout remains dispersed. Area F holds the runway, the flightline and most working functions; Area 1, in the town itself, holds the school, community centre, chapel, library and pool; civil engineering, contracting and sports fields occupy further lettered areas. Modernisation continues: the 56th Rescue Squadron completed its move from the HH-60G Pave Hawk to the HH-60W Jolly Green II when the sixth aircraft arrived in mid-January 2026, giving Europe and Africa their only resident American combat rescue helicopters.