Andravida sits on the flat, low coastal plain of Elis in the north-west Peloponnese, a few kilometres inland from the Ionian Sea and the port of Kyllini. According to the Hellenic Air Force’s own history of the 117 Combat Wing, infrastructure work began here in 1955, in the years when NATO money and American aircraft were rebuilding the Greek air arm after the Civil War. The first unit, the Killini–Andravida Air Detachment, was set up in June 1960.

On 4 March 1961 a ministerial decision replaced the detachment with the 117 Combat Group, and 339 Squadron arrived from Elefsis with Republic F-84F Thunderstreaks. The squadron’s own history, as summarised in the English Wikipedia, gives a more complicated route through Nea Anchialos in 1960 and dates its Andravida years from 1971; the Air Force page puts the move in 1961. Both agree that the F-84F was the base’s first front-line jet.

On 15 May 1969 the group became the 117 Combat Wing, explicitly in preparation for a much heavier aircraft: the McDonnell Douglas F-4E Phantom II. The runways and support facilities were rebuilt and enlarged, and the base was emptied to do it. 339 Squadron moved temporarily to Araxos, further up the coast, from 1973 until the Phantoms were ready to arrive.

The first F-4E landed at Andravida on 5 April 1974 and, according to the Air Force, deliveries were complete by the end of that year. Both squadrons came back in June 1974: 339 as the all-weather interceptor unit and 338 as the fighter-bomber unit. The dates for 338 differ between sources: the Air Force says June 1974, the squadron’s Wikipedia page 1 July 1974 with operational capability in March 1975, and the F-4 operators page 1975. The difference is between arrival and declaration.

Greece had ordered 56 F-4Es and six RF-4Es under the Peace Icarus programme; a final batch of 40 more was cancelled in 1981. The Phantoms arrived just months before the Cyprus crisis of July 1974 and became, with the A-7 and Mirage F1, the backbone of an air force now permanently facing Turkey across the Aegean. By 1992 four squadrons flew the type, at Andravida and Larissa.

The base grew with them. The Air Force records a third runway completed in 1978 and a weather radar installed that November, while 368 Applied Training Flight flew four T-33As from December 1976 to March 1989. After the Cold War, second-hand Phantoms followed: the Air Force says nine F-4Es from the Southeastern Regional Agreement arrived on 3 August 1991, with deliveries complete in November; Wikipedia counts 10 ex-Indiana Air National Guard aircraft and then 18 more, so the totals given for this batch range from nine to 28.

The Phantom’s second life began in August 1997, when the German firm DASA won the contract for the Peace Icarus 2000 upgrade. In total 38 aircraft were modernised, 37 of them by Hellenic Aerospace Industry at Tanagra, with the APG-65 radar from the F/A-18, a GEC-Marconi head-up display, GPS/INS navigation and Rafael Litening targeting pods. The first upgraded F-4E AUP was handed back at Andravida on 18 December 2002.

The upgrade kept the type competitive for two more decades, but the numbers shrank. The RF-4Es at Larissa retired on 5 May 2017 and 339 Squadron “Ajax” ceased operations on 31 October 2017, leaving 338 Squadron “Ares” alone. Fleet counts in the press show how fast the end came: The Aviationist wrote of roughly 30 F-4Es still operational in August 2024, 17 in December 2025 and 16 after the crash of 5 September 2026.

On 27 March 2024 the defence minister, Nikos Dendias, said the Phantoms would be retired as Greece tried to “homogenize its fleet of warplanes”, according to To Vima. No final retirement date had been published by September 2026, and the Phantoms kept flying: six of them made a formation flypast for PhanCon visitors in June 2026. Two fatal accidents in that period, off Andravida in January 2023 and at Tanagra in September 2026, killed four Phantom aircrew.

Andravida is not only a fighter base but the Hellenic Air Force’s tactical school. A Weapons-Tactics School was set up here in 1975, and in July 1983, citing “ever-increasing operational training requirements for air tactics and electronic warfare”, the Air Force merged it with other advanced courses into the Air Tactics Centre, a unit at the level of a combat wing.

The centre has three stated jobs: advanced training for personnel of the Army, Navy and Air Force; research and evaluation of new operational methods; and following military technology to improve combat capability. It also runs electronic warfare studies, operational trials and weapon certification. In 1987 the Joint Electronic Warfare School was added under the Hellenic National Defence General Staff.

The arrival of the F-16 and Mirage 2000 changed the syllabus. From 1990, according to the Air Force, the Fighter Weapons School trained pilots in both air-to-air and air-to-ground tactics, and air defence controllers trained alongside the pilots rather than separately. The centre describes itself as a place for “searching for new tactics”, and it is the organisation behind the base’s best-known annual event, Exercise Iniochos.

Iniochos, Greek for charioteer, began in the late 1980s as a small tactical exercise run by the Fighter Weapons School at Larissa. In 2005 planning moved to Andravida while aircraft flew from their home bases. In November 2013 the Air Force adopted a single-base concept and raised it to a medium-scale exercise, and in April 2015 it became an invitation exercise, with the “IAF” (as The Aviationist abbreviates it) and USAFE joint terminal attack controllers as the first guests.

Guests soon became a crowd. In 2019 the Israeli Air Force brought 13 F-16C/Ds, the Emirates six Mirage 2000-9s, the US 12 F-16Cs from Spangdahlem, and Italy six F-35As and six Tornados. The 2023 edition added Indian Su-30MKIs, Saudi F-15SAs and Jordanian F-16s, and the Italian Tornados used a canyon near Andravida that spotters call the “Greek Mach Loop” for low flying.

Iniochos 2025, from 31 March to 11 April, was the largest yet: 12 nations, including France, India, Israel, Italy, Poland, Qatar, Spain, the UAE and the United States, with Bahrain, Cyprus and Slovakia as observers, and about 1,300 missions across the Athens Flight Information Region. Greece itself fielded every type in its inventory. A spotters day on 7 April drew more than 1,000 enthusiasts to the base perimeter, a sign of how far the exercise has travelled from its origins as an internal Greek drill run from Larissa.

Greece signed the Letter of Offer and Acceptance for 20 F-35As on 25 July 2024, becoming, in Breaking Defense’s count, the 19th country to order the jet. Breaking Defense reported that “the jets will be based at Andravida”, with deliveries between 2028 and 2033. The United States had approved a sale of up to 40 in January 2024, and Greece holds an option on 20 more after 2030.

The price depends on what is counted. Breaking Defense gave $3.76 billion for the first 20 aircraft; The Aviationist reported an estimated programme cost of $8.6 billion, which includes far more than the airframes. The first eight aircraft are to be built at Fort Worth and the rest reportedly assembled at the Cameri final assembly line in Italy, which The Aviationist says builds about 15 F-35s a year against about 130 at Fort Worth. Neither source gives a unit price that can be compared directly.

The first jets will not come straight to Andravida. Lockheed Martin’s J.R. McDonald said they would stay in the United States for 27 months while Greek pilots and technicians trained, so the first F-35s are expected in Greece around 2030. Until then the Phantoms, the Air Tactics Centre and Iniochos keep Andravida busy, and the base’s F-35 infrastructure work has not been detailed in the sources read for this page.