Doha International Airport opened in 1959, replacing the Dukhan airstrip that the oil industry had laid out on the west coast in the 1930s. Qatar was then a British-protected state with no armed forces of its own. That changed only after Britain announced its withdrawal from the Gulf in 1967: in March of that year the Qatar Public Security Forces Air Wing was created with two Westland Whirlwind helicopters, according to English Wikipedia, and in 1971 it acquired three ex-RAF Hawker Hunters, its first jets, which flew until 1981.

The air wing was renamed the Qatar Emiri Air Force in 1974, and in 1979–1980 the emirate ordered its first modern fleet: six Alpha Jets and fourteen Mirage F1s, delivered between 1980 and 1984, followed by HOT-armed Gazelle helicopters from 1983. GlobalSecurity describes Doha International Airport as the home of the Alpha Jets and Mirage F1s and as the air force’s primary operating location, a role it kept until the new base at Al Udeid, built in 1996, took over. For some four decades the country’s fighters shared a runway and an approach with its national airline.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Doha became a coalition fighter base. Canada’s Department of National Defence records that the last of 16 CF-18 Hornets from Baden-Soellingen in West Germany arrived at Doha on 12 October 1990. Within days they had replaced US Marine Corps F/A-18s on combat air patrol in a front-line sector called Whiskey-1, and they flew cover for the carrier USS Midway as it transited the Strait of Hormuz. Wikipedia gives the camp the name Canada Dry One; Canadian Army companies from CFB Lahr, first from the Royal Canadian Regiment and later from the Royal 22e Régiment, guarded it.

When the air war began on the night of 16 January 1991 the Canadians flew sweep-and-escort missions ahead of coalition bombers. On 30 January two CF-18s attacked an Iraqi patrol boat, which Wikipedia says the pilots were credited with partially destroying. Only late in the war did they turn to ground attack, flying 56 bombing missions before the ceasefire of 28 February; the contingent had grown to 24 aircraft and about 550 people. The last CF-18 left Doha on 9 March 1991.

They were not alone. English Wikipedia says the US Air Force’s 614th Tactical Fighter Squadron, flying F-16s, deployed to Doha and became the core of a provisional 401st Tactical Fighter Wing, and GlobalSecurity says French squadrons were also there. French-language Wikipedia, however, places France’s Mirage 2000s and Jaguars at Al-Ahsa in Saudi Arabia, so the French presence at Doha is reported here only as GlobalSecurity’s claim.

Until 2014 the airport was also the main base of Qatar Airways, and its civil side grew to a capacity of 12 million passengers a year. Its 4,572-metre runway, 15/33, was one of the longest at any civil airport. Its best-known accident came on 13 March 1979, when an Alia Royal Jordanian Boeing 727 hit a downburst on a missed approach and crashed on the airfield.

Space ran out. Hamad International Airport explains that a lack of land made expansion difficult and ruled out a second runway, so a new airport was built from 2005 five kilometres to the east. Hamad had a soft opening on 30 April 2014, and on 27 May 2014 Qatar Airways and every other carrier moved across; the last scheduled departure from the old airport was a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt at 00:30 on 28 May.

Since 2014 the old airport has served the air force, the Qatar Amiri Flight and Gulf Helicopters, according to English Wikipedia. The Amiri Flight, founded in 1977 to carry the ruling family and government, remains based here; one of its C-17s is flown on behalf of the air force. The airfield returned briefly to passenger service on 14 September 2022, when at least 13 airlines moved flights here to ease congestion at Hamad during the FIFA World Cup; all those flights ended after the tournament.

What the air force keeps at Doha today is less clear than what it kept in 1991. English Wikipedia lists Typhoon, Hawk, NH90, Gazelle and Apache wings here, but the first Qatari Typhoons were delivered to Tamim Air Base near Dukhan in August 2022, and no Qatari government source reached publishes its squadron assignments. They are therefore not repeated on this page.