Sarajevo’s aviation began in the north-west of the city, at Rajlovac. The airport’s official history says the first passenger line, Belgrade–Sarajevo–Podgorica, opened in 1930 and flew from the military aerodrome at Rajlovac. After the Second World War civil flying resumed around 1947 with the JUSTA company from a grass aerodrome at Butmir, south-west of the city, and JAT flew DC-3s from there for more than two decades.

Jets needed concrete. Construction of a new airport on Sarajevsko polje next to the Butmir grass field began at the end of 1965 and took more than three years; Sarajevo-Ilidža airport was formally opened for civil traffic on 2 June 1969. For the 1984 Winter Olympics the runway was lengthened by 150 m, a parallel taxiway and new navigation aids were added, and the airport handled 50 to 70 aircraft movements a day, including DC-10s and L-1011 TriStars.

The war reached the airport in its first days. According to the airport’s history, on the night of 4 to 5 April 1992 the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), in the form of members of the Air Force Academy from Rajlovac, took the airport and held it until the middle of June; Serb paramilitary units then controlled it and, the airport says, looted it widely. The airport then passed to UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force, for humanitarian use.

The Serb side’s own account of these events was not found in the sources read for this dataset; the description here is the airport’s.

From the summer of 1992 the airport carried a humanitarian air bridge into a besieged city. The airport’s history calls it the longest humanitarian airlift ever flown to supply a surrounded city, with nearly 13,000 flights over more than three years, larger than the Berlin Airlift. English Wikipedia, summarising US Air Force history, gives dates of 2 July 1992 to 9 January 1996, aircraft from 21 countries, 12,886 sorties into Sarajevo, 159,622 tons of food, medicine and supplies, and more than 1,300 wounded evacuated; the US share alone was 3,951 C-130, 236 C-141 and 10 C-17 landings.

The airlift was dangerous. Wikipedia records that an Italian Air Force transport was shot down in September 1992 and all four crew were killed; the sources read for this dataset do not establish who fired.

The airport sat between the besieged city and Butmir on the far side of the runway, and people tried to cross it on foot. The airport’s own history says that until the war tunnel from Dobrinja to Butmir was dug under the runway, more than 800 people lost their lives trying to cross it. That figure is the airport’s; no second source was read.

Part of the airport returned to Bosnian civil authorities in April 1996, and it reopened to civil traffic on 15 August 1996, according to the airport; English Wikipedia gives 16 August. By the end of that year it had handled 26,000 passengers.

The airport is a civil airport, but not only that. Camp Butmir beside it is the headquarters of EUFOR’s Operation Althea, the European Union force in the country since 2 December 2004, with 24 contributing nations in April 2026. The Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina fly helicopters from the city: on 13 August 2025 a UH-1H II of the 2nd Helicopter Squadron with six crew flew from Sarajevo airport to Podgorica and dropped 157 tonnes of water on Montenegrin forest fires over five days. Whether the squadron’s home is the airport or the Rajlovac heliport across the city is not stated in the sources read; the ministry uses both. The brigade’s official task list puts airborne search and rescue, medical evacuation and large-scale firefighting among its civil-support missions, and in September 2026 the 2nd Helicopter Squadron was again dropping water on fires on Čvrsnica mountain.