Air travel to Harstad and Narvik began with seaplanes in 1935, according to Store norske leksikon, and planning for a shared land airport began in the 1950s. Construction at Evenes, in the municipality of the same name in Nordland, began in 1971, and Crown Prince Harald opened Harstad/Narvik airport on 30 June 1973 with a runway of 1,600 metres. NATO money later paid to lengthen it, which is why a regional airport serving two small towns ended up with a runway fit for heavy military aircraft.

The military air station grew beside the civil terminal. Store norske leksikon dates its official inauguration to 1985; the Norwegian and English Wikipedia articles, used here only as finding aids, give 1979 for the first personnel, 1986 for operational status and 1988 for independent status, so the opening is best given as 1979–1986 depending on the milestone counted. English Wikipedia describes it as opened as a hub for Bodø main air station, and Norwegian Wikipedia puts its Cold War staff at 250–300; neither figure was confirmed in an official source.

Its strongest Cold War asset came late: a NOAH (Norwegian Adapted Hawk) surface-to-air missile battery was stationed at Evenes in 1989 and was withdrawn in 1993, according to Store norske leksikon. After the Soviet Union collapsed the station was reduced, and Norwegian Wikipedia records that it was placed on mobilisation status in 1993 and removed from it in 2004, while the fighter squadrons stayed at Bodø, Ørland and Rygge.

The base’s revival was decided in Oslo. When the Storting chose Ørland as the main base for the new F-35 in 2012, it also decided, in Forsvaret’s words, to establish a forward operating base for fighters in northern Norway at Evenes. The northern alert mission had been flown from Bodø since 1982, according to Teknisk Ukeblad; the same decision closed Bodø as a fighter base, and the air force chief later argued that Evenes, further north, gives the fighters more time with the aircraft they are sent to identify.

The second decision was more painful. In the long-term defence plan debated in November 2016, the Storting decided to move 333 Squadron’s maritime patrol aircraft from Andøya to Evenes, putting Norway’s two strategic aircraft types, the F-35 and the new P-8, on one airfield. The committee recommendation of 11 November 2016 records a minority of the Christian Democrats, the Centre Party, the Liberals and the Socialist Left who proposed that Andøya should continue as the base for maritime patrol aircraft; they lost.

The fight did not end with the vote. In September 2021 the Centre Party was still trying to reverse the move, while Labour mayors of Harstad, Tjeldsund, Evenes and Narvik told NTB that it was “long since too late” to change a decision on which several billion kroner had already been spent and about 200 people hired. The move went ahead; Andøya lost its resident flying unit when the last P-3 missions ended on 30 June 2023.

Quick reaction alert is NATO’s standing air policing mission. Two armed fighters wait on the ground and, Forsvaret says, must be in the air within 15 minutes of the alarm when unknown aircraft approach Norwegian airspace. The F-16s of Bodø flew their last operational alert take-off on Thursday 6 January 2022, and from that day the mission belonged to the F-35As of 132 Air Wing, rotating up from Ørland to live in the new alert facilities at Evenes.

The rehearsal came first. In late August 2021 eight F-35s flew to Evenes for the three-week exercise Falcon Deploy with about 200 extra personnel, which the air force chief, Major General Rolf Folland, described as preparation of both the aircraft and the base for the coming alert mission. The first real scramble followed on 2 February 2022: the control and reporting centre at Sørreisa saw several Russian aircraft leave the Kola coast, and two F-35s identified a Russian A-50 Mainstay command and control aircraft.

Official figures show the tempo. Norway’s Joint Headquarters told Forsvarets forum that the F-35s scrambled 38 times in 2024 and identified 69 aircraft, eight scrambles and twelve aircraft more than in 2023, which puts 2023 at 30 scrambles and 57 aircraft. In 2025 the air force reported 41 scrambles and 53 Russian aircraft identified, among them Tu-142 Bear F, Il-38 May, Su-24 Fencer and Su-30 Flanker types, and said the numbers had not changed noticeably in recent years. No official 2022 total was found for this page.

The chain of command changed in 2025. In mid-October that year two F-35s from Evenes identified a Russian Il-20 Coot A intelligence aircraft off Finnmark, the first live mission handled by NATO’s new Combined Air Operations Centre at Bodø. Its commander, Major General Tron Strand, called it an important milestone for the centre, although for the air force itself a scramble was a routine task.

For decades 333 Squadron had flown maritime patrol from Andøya, latterly with P-3 Orions. Their replacement, the Boeing P-8A Poseidon, was contracted in March 2017: five aircraft, which replaced both the P-3s and the DA-20 Jet Falcons that had flown electronic missions from Gardermoen. Forsvarets forum gives the project budget as about NOK 11 billion in 2021 money; a later report gives a cost-adjusted frame of NOK 11.4 billion.

The first aircraft, named Viking, arrived from Seattle at 21:30 on 24 February 2022, hours after Russian forces crossed into Ukraine. “For two years, we have been working on project ‘Evenes airport’,” said the head of 133 Air Wing, Eirik Guldvog. The squadron spent the next sixteen months in operational test and evaluation, flew its first overseas exercise in Britain, and took over the national maritime patrol mission on 30 June 2023, with three of the five aircraft then in Norway.

By April 2025 the wing commander, Hans Martin Steiro, told Forsvarets forum that the aircraft worked very well and that flying hours and weekly sorties had increased, but that the programme lagged its original timeline: hangars were late, some components and equipment had been delayed, and training and authorising crews on a new aircraft took time. Keeping experienced people, rather than recruiting them, was the harder problem.

Forsvaret’s own project page puts the build-out at NOK 5.08 billion: new hangars, workshops, stores and offices in the southern part of the airfield, two officers’ quarters with 94 rooms, new barracks, a dog-service building, a kitchen and a complete renewal of underground fibre, power and water. By December 2021 contracts worth more than NOK 4 billion had been signed, 65 per cent of them with regional firms, according to Forsvarsbygg.

The numbers kept moving. In April 2022 the defence minister, Odd Roger Enoksen, told the Storting that the highest estimates were approaching NOK 8 billion, against the NOK 5.2 billion originally planned, and that a protected wetland next to the base could add more. The sources thus give NOK 5.08–5.2 billion for the plan and up to NOK 8 billion for the estimate; no official final cost was found.

The permanent P-8 hangars were meant for 2023. Instead Forsvarsbygg delivered two temporary plastic tent hangars, in January and September 2022, for NOK 168 million, and in August 2024 the permanent hangars were expected in the autumn of 2025, two years late. The tents had no integrated maintenance workshops, which the air force said reduced efficiency somewhat, but less than feared.

Construction also collided with nature. In 2021 Forsvarsbygg removed vegetation and dumped fill inside the Nautå nature reserve next to the airfield, which carries the strictest protection under the Nature Diversity Act. The County Governor of Nordland intervened, Forsvarsbygg accepted a fine of NOK 100,000 and agreed a plan to restore the Svanevatnet area before the nesting season of 2022.

Sharing a runway with an airline hub brings friction. During Falcon Deploy in the autumn of 2021 SAS twice had to keep passengers on board rather than let them walk across the apron while F-35s were running, and Widerøe, after measuring the noise, said it was seriously worried that passengers and staff could suffer permanent hearing damage from a single exposure.

A base holding two strategic systems is defended accordingly. 133 Air Wing has an air defence battalion with NASAMS III and a base defence unit with dogs, explosive ordnance disposal, medical and engineering elements; Forsvaret planned 500 employees and 300 conscripts by 2025. In March 2026 the Norwegian Defence Materiel Agency installed a counter-drone system from Operational Solutions Ltd that can detect, identify and neutralise drones, after Ørland got one in October 2025.

The threat is not theoretical. In April 2024 a communications cable counted as critical military infrastructure was found cut just outside the perimeter. The police said it had been done deliberately and recorded it as criminal damage to infrastructure; the case passed to the state prosecutors in Nordland and nobody was charged. The American outlet The War Zone reported it as confirmed sabotage; the police did not use that word.

Evenes is also an allied base. Under the 2021 Supplementary Defence Cooperation Agreement with the United States it is one of the agreed areas where, in Store norske leksikon’s words, the US has free right of use of delimited areas of the air station. American F-35s were among the aircraft whose activity from Evenes the air force announced before exercise Nordic Response in February and March 2024, which involved more than 20,000 troops from at least 14 nations.