Most of South Korea’s big air bases date from the Japanese period or the Korean War. Cheongju does not. It opened as a military airbase in September 1978, and the 17th Fighter Wing was established on 1 September 1978 in the middle of the peninsula.

The first fighters were F-5s of the 122nd Squadron, which arrived in April 1979, according to Korean Wikipedia. The base’s real identity came with the F-4E Phantom. The 152nd Squadron formed on the type in November 1979, and the 153rd (1980), 155th (1987), 156th (1988) and 157th (1990) followed. For about 40 years Cheongju was Phantom country; the jets were later transferred to the 10th Fighter Wing at Suwon, where the last of them flew in June 2024.

There is a thread from that era to this one. The 152nd Squadron, Cheongju’s first Phantom unit in 1979, is one of the two squadrons that fly the F-35A today, alongside the 151st. The 122nd Squadron, whose F-5s were the first aircraft on the base, is now an F-15K squadron at Daegu. Korean Wikipedia also records that a Patriot air defence unit was set up on the base in 2009, eleven years before the PAC-3 battery that now guards the stealth fighters.

The 29th Tactical Development Training Group, often called the air force’s Top Gun school, was formed at Suwon in October 1979 and moved to Cheongju on 7 April 1981. Korean Wikipedia describes three jobs: testing new weapons and systems before they reach the fighter wings, running advanced weapons-instructor courses, and flying an aggressor unit that imitates North Korean tactics.

Its two flying squadrons are the 191st Tactical Training Squadron and the 192nd Tactical Development Squadron. Which aircraft they fly today was not confirmed in the sources reached, and it is not given here.

South Korea bought 40 F-35As in 2014 for about 7.4 trillion won, the biggest arms purchase in its history, according to The Aviationist. The first landed at Cheongju on 29 March 2019 — two aircraft, per Wikipedia — in what The Aviationist called a low-profile manner. North Korea called the purchase a grave provocation that violated the inter-Korean agreements of the time.

The jets were shown to the public at Daegu on Armed Forces Day, 1 October 2019. Deliveries went on through the pandemic, and by January 2022, per Korean Wikipedia, all 40 had arrived and formed the 151st and 152nd Fighter Squadrons. A Patriot PAC-3 unit had been deployed to the base on 1 April 2020 to protect them.

One jet was lost to a bird. On 4 January 2022 an F-35A made a belly landing at Seosan after an eagle struck it and damaged the landing gear; the pilot got out without serious injury, and the air force retired the airframe at the end of November 2023, The Aviationist reported. On 4 December 2023 the Defense Project Promotion Committee approved 20 more F-35As for 4.26 trillion won, for delivery by 2028. How many of them had reached Cheongju by September 2026 was not confirmed.

Cheongju was once a candidate for Korea’s main international airport, before Incheon was chosen in the mid-1980s. Construction of the civil airport began in 1984 and ended in December 1996, and it opened on 28 April 1997. Since 4 February 2016 it has been designated as an alternate for A380-sized aircraft when fog closes the Seoul airports, according to Korean Wikipedia.

The arrangement has rules. The AIP names the ROKAF and the transport ministry as operators, makes 06L/24R mandatory for airliners, and warns that civil flights can be delayed by military operations. Photography of the installation is banned.

The dependency also runs the other way. Korean Wikipedia says that in wartime Cheongju would take over the operations of Incheon and Gimpo, the two Seoul airports, which sit much closer to the border. A fighter base in the centre of the country is, in that plan, also the capital’s reserve airport.