Military aviation at Skopje is older than the country. English Wikipedia says Serbian military aviators made the first landing here in 1912, during the Balkan Wars, and that German and Bulgarian aircraft used a field at Skopje in the First World War. A civil airport opened in 1928 in what is now the Aerodrom district; the present airport was built after the Second World War near Petrovec. That chronology sits awkwardly with the same encyclopaedia’s account of April 1941, which places the Royal Yugoslav Air Force’s 63rd Bomber Group, flying Dornier Do 17Ks, at "Petrovec airfield near Skopje". Which field that was is not settled here.

In the Yugoslav years Skopski Petrovac was a fighter-bomber base. Wikipedia lists the 98th Aviation Brigade there in the 1980s with the 241st squadron on the J-22 Orao, the 247th on the Jastreb and the 354th on the IJ-21 reconnaissance Jastreb, plus a helicopter unit of the 2nd Army region. In 1992 the 241st moved to Lađevci in Serbia. When Macedonia became independent, the jets had gone; none of these unit details could be checked against an official source.

The Army dates its air force to a presidential decree of 10 April 1992, which created a Command of Air Force and Air Defence with an aviation brigade, an air defence rocket regiment, a radar regiment and an air base. Its first flight, on 10 June 1992, lasted 20 minutes, from 10:15 to 10:35, in a UTVA-75 borrowed from the aero clubs, over the Dračevo training zone; 10 June is still the Air Wing’s day. The Army’s history notes that its flights had to be coordinated with the civil control tower at Petrovec.

Helicopters came first because they were what a small, embargoed army could get. The first Mi-17 arrived from Ukraine on 28 June 1994 and the 301st Transport Helicopter Squadron was activated with it; according to Wikipedia the four Mi-17s initially carried civil registrations because of the UN arms embargo. On 5 July 1994 a fully Macedonian crew flew a Mi-17 for the first time. Zlin 242 trainers followed from the Czech Republic (1996 in the Army’s account, 1995 in Wikipedia’s), and one was lost near Radoviš on 7 April 1999.

The armed conflict between government forces and the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army ran, in Wikipedia’s dating, from 22 January to the Ohrid Framework Agreement of 13 August 2001. The government answered with an emergency buying programme. Wikipedia lists four Mi-8MTs and two Mi-24Vs from Ukraine on 23 March, two UH-1Hs from Greece, further Mi-24s on 15 April, 15 June and 4 September, and four Su-25s in June; the Army’s history confirms Mi-8s, UH-1Hs, Mi-24s, Mi-24Ks and Su-25s arriving between March and September.

On 23 June 2001, during the fighting at Aračinovo on the edge of Skopje, Su-25s took off from Petrovec to reconnoitre the village; Wikipedia’s accounts differ on whether one or two aircraft flew. The Air Brigade article calls it the first time a Macedonian fixed-wing combat aircraft had operated from a Macedonian air base. The same source says that although the insurgents held Stinger and Strela-2M missiles, no aircraft was lost to ground fire; the only loss was a Mi-17 at Popova Šapka in March. Casualty figures for the conflict are contested and belong to the service page, not to the base.

Peace made the jets unaffordable. The Su-25s were withdrawn in 2004 and parked, unflyable, at the airport. In April 2010, when the government handed the airport to the Turkish operator TAV for reconstruction, the Army gave up the annex of its command building, a photo laboratory, the pilots’ restaurant, workshops and the soldiers’ club; its large hangars were demolished, and the new apron in front of the passenger terminal now stands on their site.

The Ukraine war cleared the rest. Defence minister Slavjanka Petrovska confirmed on 14 March 2023 that the four Su-25s had gone to Ukraine; twelve Mi-24s followed, of which, by one Ukrainian account, only two were still active. What remains is a Mi-8/17 squadron that the Czech firm LOM Praha helped return to service in July 2025, a training squadron, and a contract signed in March 2024 for four AW149s and four AW169Ms worth almost €250 million. Fighter cover now comes from Greece: on 9 December 2021 two Hellenic Air Force F-16s intercepted a government Learjet over the airport to mark North Macedonia’s entry into NATO air policing.