Under the Shah the base was called Shahrokhi. After the revolution it was renamed after Captain Mohammad Noje, whom English Wikipedia describes as the first air force pilot killed in action, on 16 August 1979.

Within a year the name was attached to a conspiracy. Wikipedia’s account of the Nojeh coup plot says a retired Gendarmerie colonel, Muhammad Baqir Bani-Amiri, organised its military side, with financial support from Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, and Manucher Ghorbanifar as his liaison. The plan centred on the air base near Hamadan. The authorities discovered eight major cells before it began, and arrests were made at the base on 9–10 July 1980.

The numbers given are stark: 284 arrested and 144 executed, and between 2,000 and 4,000 military personnel dismissed in the months that followed. President Abolhassan Banisadr said the plotters’ real aim was to create internal disorder as a pretext for an Iraqi invasion; Bakhtiar claimed American blessing, which Wikipedia’s account says was untrue. Iraq attacked ten weeks later, into an air force that had just been purged again.

Nojeh’s Phantoms flew some of the largest Iranian raids of the first weeks of the war. Wikipedia’s account of Operation Kaman 99, drawn largely from Iranian accounts, says 40 F-4 Phantoms took off from Hamadan on 23 September 1980, a day after Iraq’s surprise attack: 16 F-4Es against Kut, 12 against al-Rasheed near Baghdad and eight against Baghdad airport.

A week later, on 30 September, four F-4s of the 33rd Tactical Fighter Squadron from Nojeh, TAB 3, flew Operation Scorch Sword against the Tuwaitha nuclear centre and its Osirak reactor, supported by a Boeing 707 tanker escorted by F-14s. Iranian accounts say bombs hit the reactor; Iraq and Western observers described the damage as minor.

On 4 April 1981 eight Phantoms, six F-4Es and two F-4Ds, left Hamadan for the H-3 air bases near the Jordanian border, refuelling over Lake Urmia and again from tankers that had crossed Turkey and Syria in radio silence. Iran claims dozens of Iraqi aircraft destroyed; Iraq said only one MiG-21 was damaged. Neither figure has been independently confirmed.

On 16 August 2016 Russian Tupolev Tu-22M long-range bombers and Sukhoi Su-34 strike aircraft began flying raids over Syria from the base, according to English Wikipedia’s articles on the base and on the Russian intervention in Syria.

The Iranian government’s explanations shifted within days. Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan said Iran was hosting the aircraft at the request of the Syrian government and that Russia could use the base as long as necessary; on 21 August, according to Wikipedia, he said that under no circumstances would Iran provide the Russians with a military base. On 22 August the foreign ministry spokesman announced that Russia had stopped using the base for the time being.

GlobalSecurity, an open-source reference site, notes a Su-34 seen on the main apron as early as 23 November 2015.

On the first day of the Twelve-Day War, 13 June 2025, explosions were reported at the Hamadan air base, and the Israeli military later confirmed that it had struck it, according to Wikipedia’s account of the war. The Israeli air force struck air bases and aircraft across Iran in the following days. Iran did not publish an account of the damage at Nojeh, and its losses there are not known from open sources.

The strikes did not stop there. Wikipedia’s account says Israeli aircraft hit six airfields in western, eastern and central Iran on 22–23 June 2025, targeting runways and underground facilities, and claims 15 Iranian fighters and helicopters, among them F-14s, F-5s and AH-1s, destroyed; it does not say how many, if any, were at Nojeh. In December 2025 Iran’s military admitted, by the same account, that its earlier reports of two Israeli F-35s shot down were false.