Albacete owes its airfield to geography. It lies on the high plain of La Mancha, roughly halfway between Madrid and the naval base at Cartagena, and the city offered land at Los Llanos and La Pulgosa for an aerodrome as early as 1913. According to Aena, which runs the civil side of the airport today, the Ministry of War accepted the offer in 1916, and on 26 May that year a military long-distance flight from Madrid to Cartagena stopped at Albacete.

Regular flying began in the 1920s. Spanish Wikipedia names the first field La Torrecica, inaugurated in September 1923. Aena records that the first aircraft arrived for the city festivities in September 1923 and that the first pilot-training course began in February 1924, run by the Compañía Española de Aviación (CEA) under a military contract. The Spanish-language Wikipedia article on the base, citing local sources, credits the CEA school with training about 220 pilots and flying more than 25,000 instruction sorties by 1927.

The Los Llanos field was formally inaugurated on 27 April 1929, the date the summary row uses as its opening year. Budget cuts closed the CEA school in 1931–1932. Aena’s chronology treats the whole period as the origin of today’s airport, and this page follows it; the flying school, not the Spanish air arm, was the main user until the Civil War.

In the first days of the Civil War the airfield was used by the military rebels, but from 26 July 1936 it was in Republican hands, as Aena’s history states. The Spanish-language Wikipedia article adds that it housed the General Staff of the Republican air force from November 1936 until April 1938 and Republican transport aviation until March 1939, and that aircraft assembly and repair workshops were set up in and around Albacete from 1936.

Albacete city was the main depot of the International Brigades, and the same Wikipedia article says the airfield served as a base for the Brigades until October 1938. Aena’s official history, which covers the war years, does not mention the Brigades, and we could not confirm the link to the airfield itself from an official or academic source this run. It is therefore reported here only as Wikipedia’s claim, and the page does not treat the airfield as the Brigades’ headquarters.

After the war the Ejército del Aire set up the 13 Escuadra de Bombardeo at Los Llanos, according to Aena, and the wartime workshops became the Maestranza Aérea de Albacete, created by decree on 24 November 1939 and still the air force’s major maintenance depot next to the base. Wikipedia records that in January 1940 the bomber regiment held 19 captured Soviet-built SB bombers, of which five could fly.

The bomber lineage continued as Ala 26, formed on 1 March 1957 with CASA 2.111s (licence-built Heinkel He 111s), which flew in the Ifni-Sahara campaign of 1957–1958. From 1 August 1962 Ala 37 flew transports from the base, first Douglas DC-3s and, from December 1967, DHC-4 Caribous. Civil traffic came and went: Aena lists a civil period from July 1946 to 1955, daytime civil use again from 1965, charter flights from 1991 and a new 2,200-square-metre terminal in November 2005.

Los Llanos became a fighter base in March 1974, when Ala 14 was formed to take the Dassault Mirage F1. Escuadrón 141 was created on 18 June 1975 as the first aircraft arrived, and Escuadrón 142 followed on 1 April 1980. Spain bought 45 F1CEs in three batches between 1975 and 1981, six F1BE two-seaters and 22 F1EEs, and the runway was lengthened to its present 2,700 metres for the new jets.

The Mirage was Spain’s front-line interceptor through the Cold War and beyond. In October 1996 Thomson-CSF won a contract, reported at FFr700 million, to bring 48 single-seaters and four two-seaters up to Mirage F1M standard with a modernised Cyrano IV radar; the first aircraft went to Belgium for the work on 20 February 1996 according to Spanish Wikipedia, whose date sits oddly before the contract month and is unconfirmed. In 1999 Ala 14 absorbed the ex-Qatari F1s previously flown from Manises.

The wing took the F1 abroad in its final years: to Exercise Cope Thunder in Alaska in 2002 and to Šiauliai in Lithuania in 2006 for NATO’s Baltic air policing, where Spanish Wikipedia counts more than 150 scrambles. The farewell came on 23 June 2013 with an open day and a 13-aircraft flypast of three Mirages, Eurofighters and the Patrulla Águila. Hispaviación reported that the ceremony honoured the 14 pilots killed in the F1 over its 38 years in Spanish service. A plan to sell 16 retired F1Ms to Argentina in October 2013 was abandoned in March 2014, reportedly after British pressure linked to the Falklands.

Ala 14 overlapped the two types. According to the specialist site Aeronaves Militares Españolas, the first four Eurofighters, designated C.16 in Spanish service (two-seaters are CE.16), arrived at Albacete in April 2012 and joined Escuadrón 142. Escuadrón 141 re-equipped from September 2017 and deliveries to the wing ended in January 2020. The summary row’s wording that the Eurofighter replaced the F1 in 2013 describes the end of the Mirage, not the arrival of the new type.

The same source gives the squadrons’ call signs as “Chico” for 141 and “Dardo” for 142; the squadron badges are a dog (“Perros”) and a tiger (“Tigres”), and 142 has been a member of the NATO Tiger Association since 1986. Squadron numbers and call signs here come from secondary sources, as the official Ala 14 page could not be loaded this run, and should be treated as unconfirmed by the air force itself.

Spain’s two new Eurofighter buys are known as Halcón. Halcón I, approved in December 2021, covers 20 Tranche 4 aircraft (16 single-seat, 4 two-seat) with electronically scanned radar, originally to replace the F/A-18s at Gando in the Canaries. Halcón II, announced in September 2023, adds 25 more to replace the EF-18Ms of Ala 12 and Ala 15. No source we could read assigns Halcón aircraft to Albacete, so Ala 14’s place in the programme is left open.

The wing’s pilots feature in Eurofighter’s own publicity: in June 2026 the consortium profiled an Ala 14 captain in a series marking one million Eurofighter flying hours, including a return flight on which he was tasked to identify an unknown aircraft flying at medium level over the Mediterranean. The article does not say when that flight took place, and the base’s share of the fleet total is not given.

The Tactical Leadership Programme is a NATO school, not a Spanish unit. According to Spanish Wikipedia it was founded in 1978 at Fürstenfeldbruck by Germany, Belgium, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; Italy and Denmark joined in 1996, Canada left in 1997, Spain joined in 2002 and Greece and France in 2009. The programme itself speaks of a 46-year history in Germany, Belgium and now Spain.

The move from Florennes in Belgium, where the programme had been based since 1989, came in July 2009. The Albacete facility was inaugurated on 1 October 2009, the first academic course started on 4 November and the first flying course on 9 November. Spanish Wikipedia puts the investment at more than 40 million euros, including accommodation, and the annual budget at 5 million.

A typical year has about six flying courses of roughly 500 people each, and the permanent staff numbers more than 170. Membership figures differ: Wikipedia lists ten permanent member nations, while the programme’s own site now speaks of 12. Command of the programme and of its Spanish national component changed hands at Albacete on 10 July 2026. Not everyone welcomed the school. On 23 March 2007, shortly after the move was announced, local groups formed the Platform against the Militarisation of Albacete (ConMilAb), which campaigned against the programme until it dissolved in 2017.

Course TLP 2015-1 was scheduled to run from 19 January to 13 February 2015, and was one week in when disaster struck. According to the Hellenic Air Force’s own page for the course, it sent 341 Squadron from 111 Combat Wing at Nea Anchialos with four F-16 Block 50s and 41 pilots and technicians. France, Italy and the United States were among the other nations with aircraft on the ramp.

On the afternoon of 26 January an F-16D, serial 084, rolled right immediately after take-off and hit the flight line where French, Italian and other aircraft were parked. Both Greek crew, whom Stars and Stripes named as Panagiotis Laskaris, 36, and Athanasios Zagas, 32, were killed, as were nine French airmen on the ground, the last of them the following day. The Safety Investigation Board’s appendix lists Mirage 2000s, Alpha Jets and AMXs among the aircraft destroyed or damaged, and a US F-15E from Lakenheath was slightly damaged.

The Safety Investigation Board report, released through the French Ministry of Defence in July 2015, found that a loose laminated checklist had jammed the yaw-trim knob at full right deflection, so that the pilot’s left stick inputs could not stop the roll. The F-16 had no warning for extreme yaw-trim settings. The number of injured differs between sources, from 20 on the day to 33 in later tallies.