Two armed Eurofighters sit on alert at Neuburg, and two more in the north, twenty-four hours a day. The order comes from the Nationales Lage- und Führungszentrum für Sicherheit im Luftraum at Uedem on the Lower Rhine, a joint centre of the Luftwaffe, the German air navigation service and the Bundespolizei set up in July 2003 after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and after a man flew a light aircraft over the Frankfurt banking district in January 2003. The Luftwaffe runs two control centres watching more than eighty airspace sectors with access to eighteen military and over fifty civil radars, and is required to identify an unknown aircraft within two minutes of detection. The standing requirement for the alert pair is two aircraft airborne within fifteen minutes.

The numbers are published, and they are the most useful corrective on the whole subject. Answering a question from the Green defence spokesman Tobias Lindner on 18 January 2016, Parliamentary State Secretary Ralf Brauksiepe gave Germany seven genuine alert launches — Alpha-Scrambles — in 2013, ten in 2014 and eighteen in 2015. Over the same three years the two wings flew 1,066, 1,087 and 1,063 practice launches, or Tango-Scrambles. A follow-up answer covered 1 January 2016 to 16 February 2017: fourteen Alpha-Scrambles and 798 Tango-Scrambles.

In other words, the alert pairs launch for real between about once a month and twice a month, and practise roughly three times a day. The Luftwaffe’s own public description says the same thing in plainer language: German alert aircraft go up once or twice a month because radio contact with a civil aircraft has been lost. Federal police figures quoted by Die Welt in January 2016 give higher totals — 18, 33 and 42 for 2013 to 2015 — because they include operations run jointly with neighbouring air forces in border regions. Both sets are honest; they count different things.

Almost none of these events are what a film would show. Of the six civil aircraft treated as suspected renegade cases between 2013 and 2015, every one turned out to be a radio failure or a navigation fault.

At 16 February 2017 both German alert pairs launched at once — Neuburg in the south and the Richthofen group at Wittmund in the north. The aircraft they were sent to find was a Jet Airways Boeing 777 inbound from Mumbai to London Heathrow with 330 passengers and fifteen crew aboard, which had stopped answering on the radio.

What had happened was mundane. During the handover between the Bratislava and Prague area control centres the crew had dialled in the wrong frequency. Contact was re-established in the area of Nuremberg. Nobody aboard the airliner knew anything was wrong until fighters appeared alongside, and the aircraft continued to London.

This is the shape of the overwhelming majority of German alert launches: a lost radio, an aeroplane full of people who have no idea, a pair of fighters confirming by eye what the radar cannot, and everybody going home. The system exists for the case that is not mundane, and the cost of keeping it is the fifteen-minute clock running at Neuburg every hour of every day.

It also shows why the alert is held in pairs at two places. An airliner crossing Germany from the south-east can be intercepted from Bavaria far faster than from East Frisia, and the reverse is true for the North Sea approaches. When Wittmund closed for rebuilding in January 2022, the northern pair did not disappear — it moved to Laage, because the geometry matters more than the address.

On 4 May 1973 the commodore of Jagdgeschwader 74, Oberst Rudolf Erlemann, asked for his wing to be named after Werner Mölders, arguing that Mölders stood for outstanding leadership and for discipline without harshness, led by personal example. The honour name was conferred on 22 November 1973 by Generalleutnant Günther Rall, the Inspekteur der Luftwaffe and himself a Wehrmacht fighter pilot, on the thirty-second anniversary of Mölders’s death in a flying accident in 1941.

Mölders was, on the face of it, a natural choice for the 1970s Luftwaffe: the first pilot in history to reach a hundred aerial victories, a devout Catholic, and a man with a reputation for decency. The problem was Spain. Mölders commanded a Legion Condor fighter squadron in the Spanish Civil War and was its most successful pilot there, flying for Franco against the elected government of the Republic. On 24 April 1998 the Bundestag passed a resolution on the Legion Condor which, in the version adopted, held that former members of the Legion should no longer receive honourable commemoration in the Bundeswehr through the naming of barracks.

For six years nothing happened at Neuburg. Then the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt was asked for an assessment; Wolfgang Schmidt’s report, completed in 2004, concluded that Mölders was not a suitable namesake for the armed forces of a democracy. In January 2005 Defence Minister Peter Struck ordered the name removed, and on 11 March 2005 it was taken off at an internal ceremony. The division commander, Generalmajor Norbert Finster, told the wing that it was not for them, as part of the executive, to call decisions of the German Bundestag into question, however those decisions had come about or turned out.

It was not received quietly. More than sixty retired officers signed a commemorative advertisement in the national press. The counter-argument was that Mölders went to Spain under orders while formally on leave, that he was never a party member, and that the 1998 vote had been taken in a thinly attended Friday morning session against the votes of the governing coalition. The argument against was that flying for Franco was a political act whichever way the orders were written, and that a democracy’s air force cannot make a model of the apolitical soldier.

Thirteen years later the 2018 Traditionserlass codified the reasoning: the Wehrmacht as an institution is not worthy of tradition, but individual members may be taken into the Bundeswehr’s tradition after a careful case-by-case examination. Neuburg is the place where that examination was carried out first, and failed. It is why the wing at Nörvenich is still "Boelcke" and the wing at Neuburg is a number.

Jagdgeschwader 75 was raised in 1960 at Oldenburg and Leipheim, moved to Neuburg in April 1961, was renamed Jagdgeschwader 74 on 1 May and commissioned on 5 May 1961 in front of General Frederic H. Smith Jr. and Generalleutnant Josef Kammhuber. Its first aircraft was the North American F-86K Sabre, the all-weather, radar-equipped, rocket-armed Sabre Dog — Germany’s first genuine night and bad-weather interceptor, and the reason the wing existed.

The first F-104G Starfighter arrived on 12 May 1964 and the conversion ran in parallel with the Sabre for eighteen months. The Phantom era began with the first F-4F on 26 September 1974 and lasted until 12 June 2008. The Eurofighter came in the summer of 2006; the Bundeswehr’s first Eurofighter combat squadron was declared at Neuburg on 25 July 2006 and NATO was told the type was ready for quick reaction alert on 3 June 2008.

The cost is in the wing’s own incident list, and it is not small. The German record of Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 74 incidents counts 27 aircraft destroyed and a death toll in the region of forty service personnel, plus at least five civilians — four of them in a single crash at Straß near Burgheim on 30 October 1963, when an F-86K iced up on an instrument approach in dense cloud and came down on a farm. The pilot ejected. Between ten and fifteen more people on the ground were hurt.

The wing has flown without a fatal accident since 1996, which covers the whole Eurofighter era and the last twelve Phantom years. Neuburg also spent the period from spring 2014 to autumn 2015 operating out of Lechfeld while its own runway was renewed, a rehearsal in miniature for the far bigger displacements at Wittmund and Büchel a few years later.

Quick reaction alert is the peacetime task, not the whole job. The wing has flown four NATO Baltic Air Policing rotations — the first from July to December 2005, then September to November 2009, September to December 2014, and September to December 2016, the last with up to six Eurofighters and 130 personnel at Ämari in Estonia. It went to Eielson in Alaska in the summer of 2012 with eight aircraft for Distant Frontier and Red Flag Alaska, and to the Tactical Leadership Programme at Albacete in Spain in the autumn of 2013.

There is an older, stranger deployment worth keeping. On 5 May 1981 eight of the wing’s Phantoms flew non-stop across the Atlantic to CFB Goose Bay in Labrador, seven hours in the air, to use the low-flying ranges that Germany itself could no longer provide. Low flying at home had become politically impossible long before it became operationally unnecessary, and the Luftwaffe spent two decades sending its crews to Canada for it.

The most visible recent event was Air Defender 23, run from 12 to 23 June 2023 under German command and described at the time as the largest deployment exercise of air forces since NATO was founded, with roughly 250 aircraft from 25 nations. Neuburg was one of the German airfields involved. The exercise was a political statement as much as a military one: the point was to show that the alliance could move very large numbers of aircraft into Germany quickly, and that German bases could take them.