The Serbian Armed Forces date the building of Batajnica to 1947–1951 and its ceremonial opening to May 1951. English Wikipedia adds that it opened with one grass and two asphalt runways. The site lies in Zemun municipality, between the village of Batajnica and Nova Pazova, and today the Serbian AIP places its reference point 3 km north-west of the church in Batajnica. The brigade that now flies from it claims the tradition of the 6th Fighter Regiment, which, in the official wording, heroically defended Belgrade from air attack in 1941.

Batajnica entered the jet age with Western aircraft. According to the Wikipedia summary of the Yugoslav air force, the first eight F-84G Thunderjets supplied by the United States, all former 48th Fighter Wing aircraft, arrived at Batajnica on 9 June 1953, three months after the first T-33 jet trainers reached Yugoslavia. That summary, not an official source, is the basis for this date.

By the late Cold War Batajnica was the base of the 204th Fighter Aviation Regiment, whose task in the Wikipedia account was to guard the airspace of the 1st Corps and above all the capital. In 1987–1988 its 127th Squadron received 14 MiG-29s and two two-seat MiG-29UBs from the Soviet Union, while the 126th Squadron flew the MiG-21bis. The 1991 order of battle also places at Batajnica the 138th Transport Aviation Brigade, with Yak-40, Falcon 50, Mi-8 and Gazelle squadrons, and the 252nd Fighter-Bomber Squadron with Jastreb, Galeb, Utva-66 and G-4 aircraft.

When Yugoslavia broke up in 1991–1992, Batajnica stayed inside the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and became the main base of what remained of the air force. No official source read for this page describes Batajnica’s own role in the wars of 1991–1995, so this page does not attempt one.

NATO’s air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ran from 24 March to 10 June 1999. At NATO headquarters on 25 March, SACEUR General Wesley Clark defined the military mission as attacking Yugoslav military and security forces and associated facilities to degrade their capacity to continue repression of the civilian population in Kosovo; most first-night targets, he said, belonged to the integrated air defence system. It was the first time NATO had used force without the express endorsement of the UN Security Council, and some legal scholars regard it as unlawful for that reason; NATO presented it as a humanitarian intervention against the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians.

Batajnica, as the home of the MiG-29s, was among the targets. English Wikipedia says it was heavily bombed for 25 days; its article on the Batajnica suburb says it was bombed daily. No official damage assessment for the base was found. The Wikipedia summary of the MiG-29, citing Western sources, gives six MiG-29s shot down in the air and four destroyed on the ground over the whole campaign; its article on the Serbian air force gives a different split of the six, with one attributed to friendly fire from the ground. Clark’s initial finding for the first night was three: two by US F-15s and one by a Netherlands F-16.

Serbia’s official figures concern people rather than aircraft. In 2013 the then defence minister Aleksandar Vučić gave 631 soldiers killed and 28 missing, and 325 police killed and 24 missing, for the whole 1999 conflict, as summarised by Wikipedia. For civilians, Human Rights Watch concluded in 2000 that between 488 and 527 Yugoslav civilians were killed by NATO bombing in 90 incidents. HRW’s count covers only incidents it could document; no official Serbian civilian total was found among the sources read for this page.

The war reached the village too. Human Rights Watch lists among the civilian victims Milica Rakić, aged three, killed at Batajnica near Belgrade on 17 April 1999. Wikipedia’s article on her places her home about 1 km from the air base; she became the best-known child victim of the campaign in Serbia, with memorials in Batajnica and in Tašmajdan Park in Belgrade.

Milenko Pavlović, born in 1959 near Valjevo according to Wikipedia, commanded the 204th Fighter Aviation Regiment in 1999. On 4 May 1999 he took off alone in a MiG-29 against a NATO strike package returning from an attack in the Valjevo area. Serbian press accounts, among them The Srpska Times in 2019, say he pulled a younger pilot out of the cockpit to fly the mission himself, and that radar operators lost him about 12 minutes later; the wreckage fell at Bujačić near Valjevo and he did not eject.

The American account, as retold by Tango Six in 2021 from a US pilot’s podcast, is that four F-16CJs of the 78th Fighter Squadron turned to meet the MiG and that Michael Geczy fired two AIM-120 missiles that destroyed it. Wikipedia likewise credits two USAF F-16CJs. A 2019 article in Večernje novosti instead attributes the missiles to Dutch pilots; this page follows the US account for the shooter and records that Serbian accounts differ.

Pavlović was posthumously promoted to colonel and awarded the Order of Bravery. The Chief of the General Staff, General Milan Mojsilović, decided on 6 June 2019 to name the base Military Airfield “Colonel-pilot Milenko Pavlović”, and the decision was announced on 26 June 2019, the date English Wikipedia gives for the renaming. The road to the base and a MiG-29 of the 101st Squadron also carry his name, and since 2022 an annual memorial event in his name has been held at Divci airfield near Valjevo.

After 1999 only a handful of the original MiG-29s survived. Serbia rebuilt the fleet with donations. Russia agreed to give six MiG-29s if Serbia paid for their overhaul; the Wikipedia summary puts the repair bill at about 50 million US dollars. On 2 October 2017 an An-124 flew the first two into Batajnica, and the delivery of all six was reported complete in early October. One of them, a 9.13 built in July 1989, went back to the 121st repair plant at Kubinka after three days for legal and customs reasons and was returned to Batajnica by an An-124 on 1 November 2018.

Belarus formally handed over four MiG-29s on 25 February 2019, but the ceremony took place in Belarus: the aircraft were first overhauled and modernised at the Baranovichi plant at Serbian expense. The first pair reached Serbia on 17 April 2021 and the other two in May, and they were formally received at Batajnica on 9 June 2021 in the presence of the Belarusian ambassador.

Tango Six then listed 14 MiG-29s: three 9.12Bs and one two-seater from the original Yugoslav batch, one 9.12A and three 9.13s from Russia, the four Belarusian 9.13s, and two two-seaters from Russia. The Belarusian aircraft were brought to the MiG-29SD standard rather than a full SM upgrade. Tango Six estimated the whole programme of overhaul, upgrade, weapons, infrastructure and pilot training at 250–300 million US dollars, an estimate rather than an official figure.

Serbian MiG-29 and helicopter crews trained in Russia in the BARS exercises, the third of which began at Lipetsk on 2 October 2017, the day the first donated jets landed at Batajnica. The 2024 order for 12 Rafales will decide how long the MiG-29s remain the base’s front-line fighter; no official source read for this page says where the Rafales will be based.

The brigade page of the Serbian Armed Forces lists seven units: the 101st Fighter Aviation Squadron (Vitezi, Knights), the 252nd Training Aviation Squadron (Kurjaci sa Ušća, Wolves from Ušće), the 138th Transport Aviation Squadron, the 890th Mixed Helicopter Squadron (Pegazi), the 24th Air Technical Battalion, the 17th Aerodrome Security Battalion and the 177th Air Defence Artillery-Missile Division. Its aircraft are the MiG-29, G-4 Super Galeb, UTVA 75, Lasta, Piper Seneca, An-26 and C-295, with Gazelle, Mi-17 and H145 helicopters, guarded by 40 mm Bofors guns, Giraffe radar and Šilo portable missiles. The commander named there is Brigadier General Milan Elenkov.

Its tasks run from airspace control and protection through air transport, search and rescue and reconnaissance to training pilots and cadets and supporting civil authorities. The quick-reaction pair lives at Batajnica: in May 2017 the Military Construction Centre tendered two prefabricated alert hangars, 916 m2 for the MiG-29 duty pair of the air defence system and 900 m2 for the Mi-17 search-and-rescue duty pair.

The base is also a delivery point. On 19 November 2023 a civilian An-124 flew in from Paphos in Cyprus, after two An-12 flights in October, and on 23 November Mi-35P helicopters bought from Cyprus were presented at Batajnica, as Tango Six reported. When part of the manoeuvring areas was resurfaced in April 2024, the MiG-29s moved to Niš for about a week, the G-4s to Lađevci and the C-295 to Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport.

Batajnica is close enough to Belgrade’s civil airport to act as its reserve: in 2015 the airport and the base agreed on its use as an alternate during the planned reconstruction work at Nikola Tesla in 2016. It is also the stage for public shows, from the centenary air show of September 2012, which brought foreign display teams and aircraft, to the Sloboda-2019 display marking 75 years since the liberation of Belgrade.