The air force came to Bishoftu because the national airline needed its old home. In 1946, according to English Wikipedia’s article on the town, the nucleus of the future Ethiopian Air Force moved from Lideta airfield in Addis Ababa, which Ethiopian Airlines required, to the plain at Bishoftu, then usually called Debre Zeyit. Lideta had already seen the first post-war training: in 1944 a group of African-American veterans of the Second World War had set up a flying school there.

The teachers at Bishoftu were Swedes. An initial group of 19, led by Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen, left Sweden between 9 January and 16 July 1946 to train pilots and support personnel; von Rosen stayed as chief instructor of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force until 1956. Six Saab 91 Safir trainers were flown to the new base on 24 December 1946, and on 10 November 1947 Swedish pilots landed sixteen Saab B 17 bombers there, the first of 47 that Ethiopia bought.

These dates come from Wikipedia’s articles on Bishoftu and Harar Meda, which draw on the historian Tom Cooper; no official Ethiopian history of the base was reached. They explain a quirk of the modern service: an air arm later equipped first by Washington and then by Moscow was built, physically, by a neutral Nordic country, and its main base has stayed on the same site for eighty years.

After the revolution of 1974 the military government known as the Derg turned to the Soviet Union, and the air force was rebuilt around MiGs. English Wikipedia reports that at one stage all four of its squadrons, together with the 33rd operational conversion unit, were based at Debre Zeit; the article does not give the year or the aircraft each squadron flew, and this page does not try to reconstruct them.

The end of that government came to the base directly. In May 1991, according to Wikipedia’s article on Bishoftu, forces of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front bypassed the capital, occupied Bishoftu and took control of what remained of the Soviet-supplied air force. The service had to be rebuilt once more.

The MiG-21 era lingered here into the new century. A 2007 order of battle cited by Wikipedia lists an air regiment with MiG-21s at Debre Zeyit, alongside the 3rd Air Regiment at Dire Dawa, with 18 fighters and six trainers in all. By 2014 Flight International’s World Air Forces found that every Ethiopian MiG-21 had been retired.

The base’s newest residents have no pilots on board. defenceWeb reported on 17 January 2024 that Ethiopia had operated Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones since 2021, with at least four deployed at Bahir Dar and Harar Meda. The government does not publish where its drones fly from. UN bodies and human rights groups have linked Ethiopian drone strikes in Tigray and Amhara to heavy civilian deaths, findings the government disputes; the air force page sets those out with their sources.

Bishoftu is also where the air force shows itself off. The state news agency ENA reported that African air force chiefs toured modernisation and infrastructure works in the town on 14 December 2023, at the 88th anniversary and the first African Air Force Forum, and that a joint Ethiopian and UAE "Black Lion" air show closed the celebrations on 16 December. For the 90th anniversary, on 23–27 January 2026, ENA announced an aviation expo, a 10-kilometre road race in Bishoftu and an air show with teams from the UAE, Russia, the Czech Republic and Morocco.

A far larger neighbour is coming. On 10 January 2026 construction began on Bishoftu International Airport, Ethiopian Airlines’ planned hub, designed for up to 100 million passengers a year on four or five parallel runways and due in 2030; Reuters put the cost at 12.5 billion US dollars and the African Development Bank at about 10 billion, according to Wikipedia. The sources reached say nothing about what it means for the air base. The base has carried airline traffic before: about 102,000 passengers in 2005, while Bole was being rebuilt.