Hörsching, on the plain south-west of Linz, owes its existence to the Anschluss. The Bundesheer’s monument commission records that Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, came to look at the site on 25 March 1938 and that ground was broken on 12 May 1938; the German Wikipedia puts the ground-breaking on 13 March, the day after the German invasion. Linz’s civil airport, which had operated from the Katzenau district since 1934, was moved out to the new field.

Großkampffliegerschule 2, a school for bomber crews, began flying in early 1940 while building went on. By completion in 1942 the base had about 1,000 flying personnel, 200 of them pilots under training, and some 180 aircraft. The commission lists six large curved-roof hangars of the German standard type, a command building, a maintenance hangar and a concrete runway 1,200 m long and 60 m wide, as well as grass strips and barracks. Prisoners of war were among those who built it.

Allied intelligence saw a larger field. The airfield study by the historian Henry L. deZeng, built on US Air Force and German archive files, describes two parallel east-west concrete runways of about 1,280 m and 1,465 m, the southern one extended to 1,785 m by November 1944, with a very large repair hangar and seven very large hangars. It lists bomber, fighter-bomber and ground-attack units, among them KG 51, KG 76, KG(J) 27 and SG 10, and training units including Kampfbeobachterschule 2.

American troops took the airfield on 5 May 1945. The German Wikipedia names the US 65th Infantry Division; the monument commission writes “61st Division”. For ten years the base was Camp McCauley. The Americans allowed private glider pilots back onto the field from December 1949 and civil airline traffic from 1950. A stone obelisk at the base still commemorates Captain James Hayes, a US pilot killed with his co-pilot on a weather flight in 1954, who had earlier flown children from Linz with whooping cough on high-altitude flights, then thought to help them.

The Americans left in 1955. The B-Gendarmerie, the forerunner of the new Bundesheer, moved in in October 1955, followed by the armoured troops’ school. The monument commission dates the return of military flying to 1956, with a flying school company and a helicopter squadron; the German Wikipedia says flying began in 1957 with Yakovlev Yak-11 trainers and Bell 47G-2 helicopters and that the first helicopter squadron was ready in mid-1958.

Civil and military flying grew up side by side. The German Wikipedia dates their operational separation to 1964, the monument commission to the early 1970s. A separate passenger terminal was built from 1972 and opened in 1976, and the runway had an instrument landing system by 1985. Today Linz Airport occupies the north side of the shared runway and the air force the south; the military field carries the code LOXL.

Walter Vogler was born on 14 August 1904 at Heiligeneich in Lower Austria. After school he joined a mountain gun battery, trained as an officer at Enns from 1925 to 1928 and qualified as a pilot at Graz-Thalerhof in May 1930. He instructed there until 1934, helped plan a new military airfield at Wels, commanded a reconnaissance squadron from 1934 and, from late April 1936, Bomber Squadron 1 of Air Regiment 1 in Vienna.

On 15 June 1936, according to the monument commission, he was flying a three-engined Caproni Ca.133 bomber, service number 31, on a training flight towards Wels when it caught fire at about 200 m. He held the aircraft steady so that his two crewmen could jump. Leutnant Ingenieur Steszyn got out at about 100 m and survived; Feldwebel Wawrin jumped at about 40 m, his parachute did not open, and he died of his injuries. Vogler steered the bomber away from houses into a field near Wels station and was killed.

The German Wikipedia dates the crash to 15 June 1935, but both Bundesheer sources read here, the monument commission and a 2007 ministry article, give 1936, which also fits his command of the bomber squadron from April that year. The site of the crash is now a shopping centre. The base was named Fliegerhorst Vogler on 25 May 1967, and his memorial stone at the base was restored in 2007.

Hörsching became a jet base in the early 1960s. The German Wikipedia says the Saab J 29F fighter-bombers moved here from Zwölfaxing in 1962, the year the runway was renewed and extended. Sweden released 30 of the barrel-shaped jets to Austria in two batches in 1961 and 1962, and they flew with the two squadrons of the Jagdbombergeschwader until 1972. The English Wikipedia records that two J 29Fs from Linz strayed into Czechoslovakia in bad weather in 1964 and landed in a field; that episode is not confirmed by an official source read here.

The Saab 105Ö followed. Austria ordered 20 and then, in April 1969, 20 more, and the first three arrived at Hörsching on 2 July 1970. The ministry says they flew with three squadrons at Hörsching and Graz-Thalerhof as trainers, reconnaissance and light attack aircraft, fielded the display teams “Karo As” and “Silver Birds” in the mid-1970s, and patrolled the southern border with up to 14 aircraft in the 1991 Yugoslav crisis. The Hörsching jet trainer squadron joined the NATO Tiger Association in 2013 and took three Saab 105s to the exercise Arctic Tiger in Norway that June.

The price was high. The ministry counts 12 aircraft lost and 14 pilots and technicians killed in 50 years; two of the fatal crashes, in 1973 and 1977, were at Hörsching itself. The last accident, on 17 April 2003, ended with a safe ejection, and the fleet then flew 17 years without one. The fly-out was held at Hörsching on 11 December 2020, and Austria’s jet pilots then trained in Italy and Germany.

Hörsching has long been the Bundesheer’s helicopter base, and the Agusta-Bell 212 has been its mainstay since May 1980. By 2010 the ministry counted 24 of them and more than 114,000 flying hours, flown on military tasks, disaster relief at home and missions abroad. The worst day came on 20 March 2000, when an AB 212 of Fliegerregiment 3 crashed at Kirchdorf an der Krems and its three crew were killed; the interim report blamed an inadequately secured bolt in the tail-rotor linkage.

Strategic airlift arrived in 2003. The Bundesheer’s chronology dates the handover of the first of three second-hand RAF C-130K Hercules to 21 March 2003 at Hörsching; Austrian Wings gives 20 March, and the German Wikipedia says the third arrived in February 2004. A fourth airframe served as a spare-parts donor. The aircraft flew Austrians and other EU citizens out of Egypt on 1–3 February 2011 and out of Tripoli to Malta on 21 February 2011, and a medical team with two tonnes of aid from Hörsching to Tripoli on 4 May 2012.

Between 2003 and 2025 the Hercules fleet flew 18,310 hours, carried 133,167 passengers and 14,376,934 kg of cargo, and made 15,871 take-offs and landings. The first aircraft was retired in November 2025 and flown to Wiener Neustadt as a training aid for the Jagdkommando special forces. Defence Minister Klaudia Tanner said a life extension would have cost far more than an interim arrangement with Portugal to cover the gap until the C-390s arrive.

Under the Bundesheer’s long-term plan, Hörsching becomes the home of almost every new aircraft type. On 30 June 2024 Austria signed for 12 Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawks through US Foreign Military Sales for about 715 million euros; they are to be based at Hörsching from 2028 and replace the AB 212 by the end of the decade. The four Embraer C-390s, contracted jointly with the Netherlands in 2024, are to arrive from 2028 and complete the replacement of the Hercules by 2030.

The biggest decision was the jet trainer. On 28 December 2024 the ministry announced it would buy 12 Leonardo M-346FA from Italy on a government-to-government basis and station them at Fliegerhorst Vogler. The deal was finalised on 29 November 2025: about 80 million euros per aircraft and about 1.5 billion euros for the whole package with weapons, simulator, training and support, with an industrial agreement meant to return about 400 million euros of work to Austria.

The M-346FA brings jet training back to Austria after the gap since 2020, and gives Hörsching an armed jet again, for training, ground support and air policing. Upper Austria’s governor Thomas Stelzer welcomed the decision as securing the base and its skilled jobs for decades. How the new fleets will fit alongside Linz Airport’s traffic, and what the jets will mean for noise around Hörsching, is not addressed in the official announcements read for this page.