Zeltweg was chosen in the mid-1930s, when the First Republic was quietly rebuilding an air arm, because the Mur valley in Upper Styria lay deep inside the Alps and far from any border. The Bundesheer’s monument commission dates the planning to 1935 and the start of construction to 1936. By the end of 1937 four hangars, four barracks and a supply and guard building stood on the field, and a school squadron moved in during December. Regular flying started at the end of January 1938.

It lasted about six weeks. In the days of the Anschluss in March 1938 German police occupied the airfield, and on 16 March the first Luftwaffe aircraft landed. The Germans completed further buildings that spring, reorganised the Austrian training squadron into two flying schools in November 1938, concreted the runway, taxiways and aprons in 1942 and, from 1943, used Zeltweg for fighter-pilot training with Jagdgeschwader 103. Late in the war Hungarian and other Axis units fell back to the field.

American bombers attacked Zeltweg 15 times from 16 October 1944, according to the monument commission, without causing significant damage. At the end of the war the airfield passed first to Soviet and then to British forces; the RAF’s flying units left in 1947, and in 1951 the British released part of the ground for gliding. The whole airfield returned to the Austrian Republic in August 1955, infantry arrived in October, and in August 1956 Zeltweg became the central training airfield of the new Austrian air force.

For its first two decades after 1956 Zeltweg was above all a school. The Heeresgeschichtliches Museum names the Soviet-built Yak-18 as the first aircraft of the post-war Bundesheer, and the collection in Hangar 8 traces the types that followed: the Fouga Magister, the de Havilland Vampire, the Saab J 29 “Flying Barrel” and the helicopters of the 1960s. In 1967 the base was named after Franz Hinterstoisser (1863–1933), the balloonist who founded Austria’s military aeronautics.

Training in the mountains was costly. A private compilation of Austrian military air accidents lists two Fouga Magister crashes by the Zeltweg flying school, near Graz on 18 January 1961 and on the Obdacher Sattel on 24 June 1964, and two Saab Safir crashes in 1975 and 1979, each killing two men; these entries have not been confirmed on an official page. ORF confirms that a Saab 105 crashed near Zeltweg on 11 October 1977, killing both crew.

That 1977 loss was one of 12 Saab 105 crashes that ORF counted in 2007 across the type’s Austrian career. The Saab 105 itself was retired in December 2020 without a successor, and the 12 Leonardo M-346FA jets Austria has since ordered will be based at Hörsching, not Zeltweg, so Zeltweg’s own training role now rests on the propeller-driven PC-7 and on the simulator centre of the Überwachungsgeschwader.

Austria did not have a supersonic interceptor until the late 1980s. The 24 ex-Swedish Saab J 35D Drakens, rebuilt as J 35Ö, were split between Zeltweg and Graz-Thalerhof from 1988; the Bundesheer says all had reached Austria by July 1989, and Austrian Wings dates full operational readiness to 1990. The sources disagree on the first arrival: Austrian Wings wrote in 2008 that two aircraft landed at Vienna-Schwechat in January 1988, while its 2024 obituary of Oberst Doro Kowatsch says he delivered Austria’s first Draken on 6 June 1988.

The aircraft was unpopular before it flew. Austrian Wings reported that 21 of roughly 30 trained pilots resigned between 1988 and 1991 under public and media hostility, leaving nine for continuous alert duty when Yugoslav aircraft crossed the border during the fighting in Slovenia in June 1991. The Drakens then carried only cannon, because Austria read the 1955 State Treaty as banning guided missiles; Sidewinders followed from 1993.

The career figures differ between Austrian Wings’ own articles: 23,545 accident-free hours and 250 priority “Alpha” scrambles after 1991 in 2008, about 24,000 hours and 500 Alpha missions in 2024. By July 2005 only nine aircraft remained airworthy. The official farewell was held at Zeltweg on 25 November 2005, making Austria the last country to fly the type; Kowatsch, long the commander of the surveillance squadron at Zeltweg, flew the final mission on 22 December 2005. Of the 24 aircraft, 12 went to museums at home and abroad and three to technical schools.

Parliament approved the purchase of 18 Eurofighters in 2003 and the contract was signed on 1 July that year. In June 2007 a settlement negotiated by the defence minister Norbert Darabos cut the order to 15 Tranche 1 aircraft, a deal the Court of Audit later examined critically. The first landed at Zeltweg on 12 July 2007; the 12 Swiss F-5E Tigers that had bridged the gap since 2004 went home on 30 June 2008, and from July 2008 the Eurofighter carried Austria’s air policing alone. The fifteenth arrived on 24 September 2009.

Zeltweg was rebuilt for the type from 2003: a maintenance hangar, a squadron building, a training centre, a new control tower, 12 aircraft shelters, a resurfaced runway and a net arrester. The monument commission puts the infrastructure spend at more than 160 million euros; the German Wikipedia, citing the Court of Audit, says the first estimate had been 47 million. Only Fliegerwerft 2, the maintenance depot, and Fliegerabwehrbataillon 2, the ground-based air defence battalion, share the base with the fighter wing.

Concentration buys efficiency and costs resilience. In March 2026 the air chief, Generalmajor Gerfried Promberger, said Austria had 16 Eurofighter pilots and would be the last Tranche 1 operator anywhere from 2030; the ministry wants 36 successors for about 10 billion euros, with a political decision due at the end of 2027 or early 2028. Where any successor would be based has not been announced. The AIP lists Zeltweg’s aerodrome hours as Monday to Thursday 0700–1500 and Friday 0700–1100; the alert hours themselves are not published.

A fighter base in a populated valley draws complaints, and Zeltweg’s neighbours have made theirs in Parliament. In June 2011 the Green MP Werner Kogler raised the Eurofighter noise in the Aichfeld with the defence minister; Norbert Darabos replied that the airfield had existed since 1937 and that the military avoided flying at night, at weekends and at midday as far as possible. Mein Bezirk wrote in 2022 that flight noise in the Murtal had long been a source of complaints, when the Military Command Styria, Airbus and the German Aerospace Center flew three days of noise measurements over the runway.

Secrecy is the other constant. When profil reported in March 2022 that two Eurofighters had come dangerously close on approach to Zeltweg the year before, through pilot error, the ministry declined to comment, saying incidents in Eurofighter operations and training were subject to military secrecy. The same report cited a 2019 ministry paper warning that too few flying hours raise the risk of accidents; profil put the Austrian pilots’ annual total at about 100 hours.

The ministry has also used Zeltweg to show the public what the jets are for. On 10 September 2021 two Zeltweg Eurofighters were scrambled to a NATO C-17 that had descended without clearance from about 10,000 to 1,000 metres over the Salzkammergut, and escorted it out of Austrian airspace; a ministry spokesman told Austrian Wings that such a deviation had not happened in 20 years.

The Bundesheer has staged AIRPOWER at Zeltweg since 1997, with the state of Styria and Red Bull. Darabos told Parliament in 2011 that the show cost 3.6 million euros, shared equally among the three, and brought the region about 20 million euros. AIRPOWER24 on 6–7 September 2024, the 11th edition, drew 250,000 people and opened with a 25-aircraft Austrian formation; the 2026 show was cancelled in September 2025 because of budget consolidation and a runway renovation, and the next is planned for 2027.

Long before the air show, the airfield was a racing circuit. The German Wikipedia records a non-championship Austrian Grand Prix here in 1963, won by Jack Brabham, and the first world-championship Austrian Grand Prix in 1964, won by Lorenzo Bandini in a Ferrari after 105 laps; 11 of the 20 starters retired on the rough concrete. The race moved to the purpose-built Österreichring nearby in 1970.

Hangar 8 houses the Military Aviation Museum. The Heeresgeschichtliches Museum says the collection was created in 2005 for the Bundesheer’s 50th anniversary and has been run as its outpost since 2012, with more than 25 aircraft on 5,000 square metres, from the Yak-18 to the Draken, together with radar, anti-aircraft guns, uniforms and photographs. The German Wikipedia counts 23 aircraft; the figure depends on the date.