The Portuguese Air Force tells the story from the beginning. In 1926 a Fokker seaplane made the first Portuguese flight from Lisbon to the Azores, and in 1928 Lieutenant-Colonel Cifka Duarte was sent to find a site for an airfield. He chose Achada on Terceira. On 4 October 1930 an Avro biplane flown by Captain Frederico Coelho de Melo took off from its 600 by 70 metre strip. The US Air Force history office dates that first take-off to 30 October 1930; the two official histories disagree.

In 1934 work began on a compacted earth runway at Lajes, on the flat north-east corner of the island, under the engineer Captain Magro Romão. It was modest, but it was in the right place. When the Second World War turned the Atlantic into a battlefield, neutral Portugal realised that the Azores were exposed, and in 1941 Lisbon sent two fighter flights with Gloster Gladiators to the islands: Esquadrilha N.º 1 to Santana on São Miguel and Esquadrilha N.º 2 to Lajes on Terceira.

On 4 August 1942 the two fields were formally made air bases. The Air Force’s own history is precise and a little surprising: Base Aérea N.º 4 was constituted at Santana on São Miguel, and Base Aérea N.º 5 at Lajes. The number four later passed to Lajes, which is the base that carries it today. In September 2026 the Air Force marked the base’s 85th anniversary with a ceremony presided over by the Vice-President of the Azores regional government.

Portugal stayed neutral in the Second World War, but it did not stay out of it. Invoking the Anglo-Portuguese alliance that dates back to the Treaty of Windsor of 1373, Lisbon and London signed an agreement on 17 August 1943 that opened the Azores to British forces. No. 247 Group of the Royal Air Force came ashore at Angra on 8 October 1943 and laid steel planking to lengthen the Lajes runway so that heavy aircraft could use it.

The US Air Force history office says British Hudsons, Fortresses and Wellingtons were hunting U-boats within a 500-mile radius of the Azores within two weeks, and credits a B-17 with the first kill on 9 November 1943. The Portuguese Air Force puts it more simply: thirty days after the British landed, the first German submarine was sunk. Closing the mid-Atlantic air gap was the whole point of the exercise.

Americans followed. The history office dates the first US bomber ferried through Lajes to 1 December 1943; the Seabees of the 96th Naval Construction Battalion arrived on 9 January 1944, and US Army engineers a week later. The Portuguese Air Force records American detachments from February 1944. In 1945 Lajes carried the Green Project, which flew more than 50,000 veterans home on over 7,000 C-54 sorties. On 2–3 June 1946 control returned to Portugal; the Americans stayed on as tenants.

The Cold War gave Lajes a permanent American role. More than 3,000 aircraft passed through during the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949, and the defence agreement of 6 September 1951 put the US presence on a treaty footing. US Forces Azores was organised on 16 March 1953, the US Navy opened a Naval Air Facility in 1957 and flew P-3 Orion patrols from 1967. The US military population rose from 1,020 in 1952 to 3,020 in 1959.

The base’s most famous hour came in October 1973. Lajes became the refuelling stop for Operation Nickel Grass, the American airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. From 14 October to 14 November, 312 C-5 and 845 C-141 sorties delivered 22,395 tons of equipment, and up to 56 aircraft crowded the ramp at once, according to the US Air Force history office.

The pattern repeated in the Gulf War. Between August 1990 and February 1991 the base handled more than 12,000 aircraft operations, disbursed some 40 million gallons of fuel, hosted up to 33 tankers and saw more than 75,000 people pass through. On 16 March 2003 Lajes also hosted the summit of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, José María Aznar and José Manuel Durão Barroso, four days before the invasion of Iraq began.

For Portugal the base has always meant rescue. After the war, the Air Force says, Lajes flew B-17s, C-54s, SA-16 Albatross amphibians, Sikorsky SH-19 helicopters and Dakotas on search and rescue, with weather reconnaissance, transport and pilot training as secondary tasks. From 1961 activity slowed as the Air Force poured its resources into the wars in Africa. In 1978 the base came under the new Comando Aéreo dos Açores, with search and rescue, tactical transport and maritime patrol missions.

Esquadra 752 was formed in 1978 on the SA-330 Puma. In 1993 the Azores Air Command was abolished and the base reorganised: on 13 October 1993 squadrons 503 and 752 were disbanded and replaced by Esquadra 711 with two flights. From 30 November 2006 a detachment of EH-101 Merlins from Esquadra 751 took over rescue alert, and Esquadra 711 was deactivated on 11 April 2007. Between 2008 and 2011 the Pumas came back under “Operation Fénix” before retiring after 34 years.

The two official Air Force pages disagree on those Puma dates: the squadron page gives 12 September 2008 to 13 April 2011, the base page 24 September 2008 to 5 April 2011. Either way, the workload kept growing. By the Air Force’s count, rescue and medical evacuation missions flown by the Merlin detachment rose by 236% in a decade, and on 16 May 2023 Esquadra 752 “Fénix” was reactivated on the Merlin. A C-295M detachment, activated on 12 March 2010, flies maritime patrol, transport and evacuations between the islands.

The American units at Lajes are American, not Portuguese: today the US Air Force’s 65th Air Base Group, which also looks after Morón in Spain. On 13 December 2012 the US Air Force announced that the 65th Air Base Wing would shrink to a group, cutting more than 400 military personnel and 500 family members by the end of fiscal year 2014 to save an estimated 35 million dollars a year.

The redesignation took place on 14 August 2015, when the group was placed under the 86th Airlift Wing at Ramstein. The Heritage Foundation, in a 2020 report, counted some 1,100 US service members at Lajes in December 2012 and 165–178 afterwards, depending on the date; the counts differ because they were taken at different times. Wikipedia, used here only as a finding aid, gives a cap of about 170 active duty.

Portuguese civilian workers paid a large share of the price. According to the news agency Lusa, reported by Observador, the plan announced in January 2015 foresaw about 400 Portuguese dismissals; by September 2016 about 450 workers had accepted negotiated terminations and around 410 permanent Portuguese staff remained. The Heritage Foundation writes that Terceira lost a large part of its economy; its figures are an advocacy group’s estimates and are not repeated here.

Lajes has returned to the headlines as a staging post. In June 2025 Portugal’s Ministry of National Defence said the United States had requested, through a diplomatic note, the use of Lajes by 12 refuelling aircraft, and that it had been granted; the ministry stressed that these were tankers only. The request came days before the American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

In 2026 the traffic grew. Lusa reported that from 18 February 15 KC-46 tankers, 12 F-16s and several transports including a C-5M passed through. Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel acknowledged that the bilateral agreement allows short-notice, tacit authorisations. In March Prime Minister Luís Montenegro told parliament that US use of the base was authorised on conditions: operations had to be defensive or retaliatory, necessary and proportionate, and aimed only at military targets.

The other difficult subject is pollution. According to reporting summarised by The Portugal Post, US authorities identified hydrocarbon and heavy-metal contamination around the base in 2005, Portugal’s National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC) confirmed it in 2009, monitoring began in 2012, and clean-up work was suspended in 2020–2021. A University of Coimbra doctoral study has reported higher metal concentrations in skeletal remains from Praia da Vitória than from Angra do Heroísmo. These are reported findings under discussion, not settled conclusions.