The First Republic had planned a military airfield on the flat farmland of the Tullnerfeld, west of Vienna, but it was the German Luftwaffe that built it after the Anschluss. According to the Bundesheer’s monument commission, construction began in September 1938 and the topping-out ceremony was held on 8 March 1939, with local people obliged to take part; the English Wikipedia puts the start in June 1938. The site got runways, taxiways, barracks, officer housing and a free-standing command building with a characteristic onion dome that still marks the base.

Langenlebarn was above all a school. The German Wikipedia lists the pilot school FFS A/B 112 Tulln and Luftkriegsschule 7, with brief stays by FFS 114 and a cadet battalion; the English Wikipedia says the war school had about 2,000 people by 1942. Operational units passed through only briefly: the Stuka group II./StG 2 in May and June 1942 and the bomber group III./KG 30 in March 1944. The monument commission notes that, although Vienna and the refinery at Moosbierbaum nearby were bombed heavily, the airfield escaped serious attack until the last weeks of the war.

In mid-March 1945 the aircraft were moved west. Before the Red Army arrived, the Luftwaffe pulled out completely and the Waffen-SS blew up the flying installations; artillery duels across the Danube wrecked most of the barracks. The German Wikipedia says the Red Army occupied the field on 7 April 1945, just after Luftkriegsschule 3 had arrived from Oschatz in Saxony. The Soviet occupation of the airfield itself lasted only a few months.

Although the Tullnerfeld lay in the Soviet zone of occupation, the airfield was assigned to the United States in July 1945; the English Wikipedia dates the handover to 26 and 27 July. Vienna’s own airfields were unsuitable or in Soviet hands, so the Americans ran Langenlebarn as Tulln Air Base, their air link to the four-power capital. From November 1945 it handled both military and civil traffic, and the monument commission counts four civil airlines using it, Pan American World Airways among them.

In June 1946 Pan Am opened a scheduled service between New York and Langenlebarn. It brought home some of the Austrians who had fled the Nazis: the composers Robert Stolz and Hanns Eisler both arrived here from American exile in 1946. The base kept that role for a decade, and in May 1955 the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, landed here on his way to sign the Austrian State Treaty in Vienna.

The Americans did little to repair what the war had left. The monument commission records that the barracks were still largely in ruins in 1955, when the US forces withdrew under the State Treaty. The later namesake Leopold Figl, chancellor from 1945 to 1953 and then foreign minister, often flew from Tulln to the negotiations that led to the treaty, according to the ministry’s 2024 announcement.

The airfield passed to the Austrian authorities at the end of September 1955; the monument commission gives 29 September and the German Wikipedia 30 September. On 18 October 1955 an airfield command was formed at Tulln-Langenlebarn, the date the service’s chronology treats as the birth of the Second Republic’s air arm. The Soviet Union donated four Yak-18 and four Yak-11 trainers, and on 9 December 1955 Oberstleutnant Gustav Hauck made the first flight in the Yak-18 3A-AB.

Hauck also brought the first helicopter, a Bell 47G2, from Paris on 4 April 1956, and Langenlebarn became the home of the helicopter force. A regimental history on gotech.at records the first two Agusta-Bell 204s arriving in June 1963, two more that autumn, and a brigade headquarters and Fliegerregiment 1 formed here in January 1966. The same history records how thin the margins were: in 1963 a Saab 17 target tug was withdrawn for want of parts.

The helicopters soon proved their worth. In the Carinthian and East Tyrolean floods of autumn 1965 the helicopter group flew 570 hours, 163 of them by the Langenlebarn squadron, and in August 1968 the base supported border reconnaissance during the Czechoslovak crisis. The aviation technical college opened in the 1968/69 school year, training technicians for both the military and civil aviation, and in 1976 the Kiowa arrived.

The avalanche at Galtür on 23 February 1999 killed 31 people and cut off the Paznaun valley. The ministry records 1,820 soldiers and 47 helicopters in the operation, and the rescue relied on foreign heavy helicopters, among them US Army Black Hawks. Austria decided to buy Black Hawks of its own on 6 October 2000 and signed for nine on 29 December 2000. The first landed at Langenlebarn on 18 October 2002, and Hangar 5 was renovated and enlarged to take them.

The fleet has not been trouble-free. Militär Aktuell reported that from about 2017 obsolete parts could no longer be bought and aircraft had to be cannibalised to keep others flying; the S-70As have since received new avionics. On 6 November 2008 Fliegerregiment 3 was converted here into the new Luftunterstützung (Air Support) formation, and the Air Support Wing now flies the Black Hawks, OH-58 Kiowas and PC-6 Turbo Porters from Langenlebarn, with an airfield command at Wiener Neustadt.

The fleet is growing. In 2023 the defence minister, Klaudia Tanner, opened an enlarged apron and taxiway for the Black Hawks, and in January 2024 ORF reported a 15 million euro workshop, maintenance and paint-shop complex, due for completion in summer 2025. Three refurbished ex-US Army UH-60Ls are due in 2026–2027, and twelve new UH-60Ms from 2028; the ministry has said the new UH-60Ms will be based at Hörsching, not here.

Since 2007 the air force’s training has been concentrated at Langenlebarn, according to the German Wikipedia, and the base also houses Fliegerwerft 1, the maintenance depot. Its next role is as the main base of the Leonardo AW169 "Lion". The ministry’s December 2022 briefing planned 36 helicopters, 12 operational and 12 for training at Langenlebarn and 12 at Aigen im Ennstal, for about 346 million euros under a government-to-government deal with Italy, or 446 million euros with infrastructure and VAT.

The AW169 replaced the Alouette III, which ended operational flying at the end of 2023 after more than half a century, and will replace the OH-58 Kiowa, due to retire in 2028. The first AW169 was handed over on 21 December 2022. Deliveries have slipped: in June 2026 Militär Aktuell counted 11 AW169Bs in Austria, against a 2020 plan for the first 18 by April 2024, blaming titanium defects in Pratt & Whitney PW210A engine parts.

The ground school has moved faster than the aircraft. Militär Aktuell describes a new simulator centre at Langenlebarn with ten virtual desktop trainers and devices that allow night-vision training, and quotes the ministry that pilot training is on schedule. The German Wikipedia puts the AW169 infrastructure investment at more than 100 million euros, with a simulator building begun in 2024; that figure is not on the ministry pages checked.

In 1967 the base was named after Godwin von Brumowski, credited with 35 victories as Austria-Hungary’s most successful First World War fighter pilot, though some sources give 40. On 24 April 2024 the ministry announced that the Military Historical Monument Commission had decided on a new name because of "historically critical facts", which it did not set out in public. Militär Aktuell noted that no further reason was given.

The new name, effective 15 May 2024, is the first double name of an Austrian military airfield. Leopold Figl, born in nearby Rust im Tullnerfeld, was the first chancellor of the Second Republic and signed the State Treaty as foreign minister. General Othmar Pabisch trained as a helicopter pilot at Langenlebarn in 1960, flew more than 5,000 hours, flew Pope John Paul II during his 1983 visit, commanded the Air Division from 1985 to 1998 and was the air force’s first general.

The choice was contested. In July 2024 the Freedom Party’s Volker Reifenberger and Andreas Bors called it arbitrary, citing a commission paper that described Figl as not directly linked to the Bundesheer and listing the commission’s alternatives: Pabisch, Tauschitz, Bernegger or simply Fliegerhorst Langenlebarn. The People’s Party’s Friedrich Ofenauer replied that the commission had recognised Figl’s merits in its minutes, and the ministry called him an architect of the Second Republic.