The airfield at Fallon was built in 1942 as part of a defensive network against a feared Japanese attack on the West Coast. After the war it had no naval use: from 1946 to 1951 it was used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Navy returned in 1951, and on 1 January 1972 it upgraded Fallon from an auxiliary station to a full naval air station and a major aviation command.

The airfield is named after Commander Bruce Van Voorhis (1908–1943), who was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. It sits at almost 3,935 ft above sea level, and its main runway, 13R/31L, is 14,001 ft long, with a second of 11,076 ft and a crosswind runway of 7,003 ft.

Top Gun was born at NAS Miramar. In 1968 the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas Moorer, ordered Captain Frank Ault to find out why American air-to-air missiles were failing over Vietnam; one result was the Navy Fighter Weapons School, set up on 3 March 1969 within VF-121 under Lieutenant Commander Dan Pedersen. The Navy credits it with lifting its kill-to-loss ratio against North Vietnamese MiGs from 2.42:1 to 12.5:1; the figures are the Navy’s and compare different periods of the air war.

When the 1993 base closure round handed Miramar to the Marine Corps, Top Gun went to Fallon. On 11 July 1996 the Navy merged it with Strike University, the Naval Strike Warfare Center and Topdome, the airborne early warning school, into the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center; the reserve adversary squadron VFC-13 came too. In 2016 the centre was renamed the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center. Its schools now include Top Gun, the Carrier Airborne Early Warning Weapons School and the Rotary Wing Weapons School.

What makes Fallon matter is the airspace. The Fallon Range Training Complex has four main bombing ranges — Bravo 16, 17, 19 and 20, the last 41,007 acres on its own — and Wikipedia gives 84,000 acres of land under 6.5 million acres of airspace; its NAS Fallon article gives 240,000 acres of bombing and electronic warfare ranges; the sources do not explain the difference. The lands were reserved for the Navy by the Military Lands Withdrawal Act of 1986.

The targets are close. Wikipedia places Bravo 16 nine nautical miles south-west of the air station, Bravo 19 sixteen miles south-south-east, Bravo 17 twenty-three miles east-south-east and Bravo 20, the largest, thirty-one miles north-north-east. A tactical combat training system installed in 2001 lets instructors track every aircraft in a fight and replay it afterwards, which is what turns a range into a classroom.

Modern weapons outranged the old ranges. The Navy’s modernisation plan renewed the land withdrawal and added more public and private land, larger airspace and new infrastructure; its Record of Decision was signed in March 2020, and the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, enacted on 23 December 2022, granted the expansion. In December 2025 the Navy was still reporting progress on the commitments it had made and consulting on a heritage agreement under the National Historic Preservation Act. The exact acreage added was not confirmed from the sources used here.

Students at Fallon need someone to fight, and the Navy keeps its own enemy air force. The reserve squadron VFC-13, the Fighting Saints, came from Miramar with Top Gun in 1996, and the Navy’s adversary fleet is small and old: the Defense Department’s FY2025 budget overview, as reproduced by Wikipedia, lists 31 F-5F/N Tiger IIs and 22 F-16 Fighting Falcons in Navy hands.

Top Gun has flown many borrowed and bought enemies since 1969 — A-4 Skyhawks, T-38s, F-106s and Israeli-built Kfirs among them — to give pilots something that does not fly like a Navy fighter. Which squadron flies which adversary type at Fallon today was not confirmed from an official source for this page.