The front door is a concours — a competitive examination, not an application. The main route is from the French classes préparatoires in the MP, MPI, PC and PSI streams; alongside it sit concours for holders of a science licence, for holders of a sciences politiques licence, and a concours sur titres. Internal competitions bring in serving non-commissioned officers. Since the 2015 reform all of these paths, previously run by the École de l’air, the École militaire de l’air, the Cours spécial de l’École de l’air and the Cours spécial de formation des officiers, converge on a single school that took back the original name.

About 500 aviators a year are trained on the site across those different cursus. The course rests on three declared pillars: military and sporting formation, academic teaching, and aeronautical instruction. The academic end is not decorative. The École de l’air’s engineering diploma was instituted by a decree of 18 May 1942 and the Commission des titres d’ingénieur authorised it from 1951; the school has been counted among France’s grandes écoles d’ingénieurs since 1985 and its accreditation was renewed for the maximum period in 2015 and again from 1 September 2020. Cadets can instead take a master in humanities and social sciences with the Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, or a master or licence from Aix-Marseille Université.

Every cadet flies, whatever their eventual speciality, though not much: roughly twenty hours of familiarisation and initiation, gliding first and then light aircraft with glass cockpits. Real pilot training happens elsewhere. Aeroplane pilots go on to Cognac, fighter pilots then to Tours, transport pilots to Avord, and future helicopter pilots to the Army light aviation schools at Dax and Le Luc.

The traditions are as fixed as the syllabus. Each promotion takes a parrain and the name sticks for life: 1935 Guynemer, 1936 Astier de Villatte, 1937 Mézergues, 1938 Mailloux, and so on through the war years. First-years are the poussins — chicks — a reference to the school badge, drawn in 1935, in which an eagle hands a dagger to fledglings in a nest. On 18 October 2019 the then minister Florence Parly entrusted the first-year cadets with the traditions and the fanion of Escadrille française de chasse no 1, the first unit made Compagnon de la Libération; they now wear the black-and-green fourragère of the Croix de la Libération.

The lineage runs through Salon twice over. The first French formation display was flown in 1931 at Étampes-Mondésir on Morane-Saulnier MS.230s; that patrouille d’Étampes followed the school to Salon in 1937 and became the Patrouille de l’École de l’air. Separately, on 17 May 1953 at Maison-Blanche in Algeria, the commentator Jacques Nœtinger christened a four-ship of Republic F-84Gs the Patrouille de France; the air staff ratified the name on 14 September 1953, and for a decade the title moved between fighter wings at Reims, Dijon, Cambrai and Nancy. In 1964 budget cuts dissolved the Mystère IV patrol, and rather than lose the name the ministry conferred it on the six Fouga Magisters at Salon. It has not moved since.

The Fougas flew the title for sixteen years, ending with a last display at Salon on 16 September 1980. The Alpha Jet arrived in 1981 with seven aircraft, eight from 1982, and is still there: twelve airframes, eight in the display, nine for the 14 July flypast in the formation called Big Nine.

What makes it an operational unit rather than a troupe is the manning. Three pilots join each year, chosen by cooptation by the pilots in place, from serving fighter pilots who volunteer, hold the chef de patrouille qualification and have at least 1,500 hours on jets. The leader, Athos 1, holds the seat for exactly one year and is the only member who cannot be replaced; Athos 4, the charognard, sits behind the leader eating his smoke and inherits the lead the next year; Athos 9, the replacement, is the most senior pilot and can fill any seat but that one. Around forty specialist mechanics keep the aircraft flying; the ministry counts more than sixty aviators in the unit.

The year splits in two. From October to April the new team trains at Salon, two or three flights a day, building the season’s série — the ruban of formation changes and the synchro flown by the two solos — under a flight-safety commission, with the smoke added only at the end. The complete routine is traditionally first flown through at Solenzara, and the finished display must be cleared by the air force inspection and the chief of staff before it can be shown anywhere. Then come roughly fifty displays, mostly in France, a CASA CN-235 hauling ten tonnes of equipment behind them.

The decision to build at Salon was published before anything was built, and it was immediately attacked. The weekly Les Ailes ran a piece on 18 May 1933 under the title Où doit-on installer l’École de l’air? arguing that putting the fundamental schools of the air force on the Mediterranean littoral, three hundred kilometres from the likely departure points of an Italian attack, in a region of clear nights and high cloud bases, was madness. The ministry went ahead anyway. Land was bought across the communes of Salon-de-Provence and Lançon-Provence, and the first structures up were two Jeumont hangars on the east of the site — both still standing.

The base-école no 356 was created in 1936 with the arrival of bataillon de l’air 130. When the 111 cadets of the promotion 1937 Mézergues arrived in May 1937 they moved into wooden huts on a building site. By July 1937 the Centre École de Salon comprised an aerostation instruction group, an air battalion and an aviation instruction group with thirty-two aircraft on charge; the site held 1,929 people and 255 aeroplanes in all.

The permanent architecture came next, and it is the reason Salon reads as an academy rather than an airfield. The bâtiment de la direction et de l’enseignement, universally the BDE, was commissioned in 1935 from Albert Tournaire (1862–1958), a Prix de Rome architect known for his work at the Villa Médicis and for the archaeological reconstructions at Delphi. Begun in February 1938 and completed in 1942, it was designed to be autonomous: dormitories, classrooms, a laundry, a chaplaincy, a cobbler, the cadets’ refectory and the administration all under one roof, with two reservoir towers framing the facade as a deliberate statement of self-sufficiency.

Inside it is the amphithéâtre Marin-la-Meslée, whose stage panels were carved by the sculptor Gaston Étienne Le Bourgeois (1880–1956) with scenes of Icarus and Bellerophon and installed in 1948. Elsewhere is the salle des Marbres, where the names of every former cadet lost on duty are cut into stone, and where the 1946 Légion d’honneur citation is displayed. The post-war campus grew around these: the place d’armes Pelletier-Doisy, the Testart and Brocard buildings of 1952 with the Valin block later linking them, the gymnase Agnel in 1972. The school today counts 183 buildings on a 445-hectare campus and a médiathèque holding more than 55,000 documents.

In late August 1939, with bombing feared, the École de l’air was ordered to fall back on Bordeaux, flying from satellite fields at Bergerac and Mont-de-Marsan. After the armistice of 22 June 1940 the school was closed. An attempt to evacuate the cadets by sea to North Africa failed; entrained for Marseille, they were diverted to Collioure, baptised in the château des Templiers, then ordered back to Salon and dissolved on 31 August 1940.

Salon filled with the wreckage of the defeated air force: the headquarters of Forces aériennes no 37, groupe de chasse I/6, four air companies and two air battalions, soon demobilised. The school was allowed back into Provence at the end of 1941 and was formally dissolved on 27 November 1942, three weeks after the Wehrmacht occupied the base in the Case Anton takeover of the free zone. The promotions of 1940 Steunou, 1941 Dagnaux and 1942 Tricaud went semi-clandestine — Toulouse, the Jeunesse et montagne movement, engineering schools, the Resistance — and Tricaud narrowly escaped deportation under the Service du travail obligatoire.

In parallel a concours was held in North Africa: forty-one candidates formed the promotion Capitaine Thouvenin de Villaret, trained in the Moroccan Atlas and then went to the United States for flying training, as did two metropolitan promotions.

The field went to work for the Luftwaffe: Kampfgeschwader 100 with He 111s from February to April 1943, Kampfgeschwader 26 with He 111s to March 1944, Zerstörergeschwader 1 with Bf 110s in May 1944 and Kampfgeschwader 77 with Ju 88s in June and July 1944. Three successive Allied bombing campaigns followed. The base was taken during Operation Dragoon in August 1944, used as Advanced Landing Ground Y-16 by the American 27th Fighter Squadron on A-36 Apaches and the 47th Bombardment Group on A-20 Havocs, and handed back on 20 November.

What the French detachment found was a ruin. Of the pre-war ensemble only part of the BDE, the hangars, the cadets’ house and the mas de Lurian survived; the north hangars were gutted, the BDE’s east wing dynamited by the Germans, the installations looted. Rebuilding started in late 1945 and the school came home at the end of June 1946. On 14 April 1947 President Vincent Auriol pinned the Légion d’honneur and the Croix de guerre with palms to its colour, and on 3 April 1948 the Guynemer fourragère came back from the Musée de l’air.

The Patrouille de France is the loudest thing at Salon but by no means the busiest. Initial military aeronautical training is run by the Centre de formation à l’aéronautique militaire initiale 5/312, named after Capitaine Élisabeth Boselli, the first Frenchwoman to qualify as a fighter pilot — brevetted at Tours in 1946. Its inventory is modest and relentlessly used: twelve Cirrus SR20 and SR22 with glass cockpits, which replaced the Socata TB 10s in 2012; three Jodel D140; seven Duo Discus and ASK 21 gliders; and ten simulators. Around it sit the escadron d’instruction en vol 3/5 Comtat Venaissin and 2/93 Cévennes, the gliding instruction squadron Sainte Victoire, and the escadron de formation des navigateurs de combat 1/93.

Gliding is not a hobby bolted on: an air force gliding section was created here in 1990, the published chart reserves the eastern part of the aerodrome for gliding, remotely piloted flights and school motor flying, and a derogatory glider sector named Provence operates there without traffic information from the tower. For most cadets the glider is the first aircraft they are ever alone in.

The Équipe de voltige de l’armée de l’air et de l’espace was created here in 1968, on a 1967 decision by General Maurin and the armed forces minister Pierre Messmer, specifically so that France would be represented at international aerobatic competitions. It began on borrowed Stampe SV4s, moved through the CAP 10B and CAP 20, then the CAP 230, 231 and 232, and has flown the Extra 330SC and 330LC since 2008. Its pilots have taken five individual world titles — Claude Bessière 1990, Renaud Ecalle 2009, François Le Vot 2013, Alexandre Orlowski 2015, Florent Oddon 2022 — and team titles in 1990, 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019. It competes; it does not exist to entertain.

The ground side matters too. The Centre de recherche de l’armée de l’air, the CReA, was set up in 2004 with a triple remit of fundamental research, applied research and teaching; an ONERA laboratory has been on the base since 1992 and its researchers teach at the school. The Centre d’initiation et de formation des équipages drones trains drone crews, and Défense conseil international has run an international course here with Aix-Marseille Université since 2016. Add a NEDEX bomb disposal group and an air control and safety squadron, and the total comes to some forty aircraft and about 56,000 air movements a year.

The wind is written into the geometry. Runway 16/34 has QFU 158 and 338 degrees, pointing it almost exactly along the axis of the mistral as it comes down the Rhône corridor from the north-north-west. That is not coincidence: kind flying weather was one of the four criteria on which the site beat Versailles, Orléans, Bordeaux and Montpellier in 1933, and the mistral is the price of it — clear skies and a hard, gusty, persistent wind the gliders then exploit. The main paved runway, finished in 1954, is still called the piste Mistral — after the first jet to use it, the French-built Vampire, rather than the wind itself.

The runway existed because the old field did not work. A ministerial note of July 1950 recorded that the surface was silt-based, that aircraft deformed it and the deformations then damaged the aircraft, that rainwater did not drain so the strip was unusable for long periods, and that the base commander had considered decamping to Orange for the whole wet season. A 1,000-metre strip, a control tower and a weather station came in 1951; the surfaced runway followed in 1954, and the Fouga Magister in 1956.

The chart still warns that 16/34 is slippery in rain and that the field sits in an area of heavy bird concentration; radio-less aircraft are barred and outside traffic is prior-permission only. The flying day is short and early, which is how the training gets done before wind and heat build: air traffic service runs Monday to Thursday 0700 to 1600 and Friday 0700 to 1400, weekends on request.

In 2026 the division of labour with Cognac is settled: pilot training belongs to Base aérienne 709, where the Pilatus PC-21 replaced the Alpha Jet in the advanced course in 2018. Salon keeps what comes before and around it: the concours, the degree, the first flying brevet on gliders and Cirrus, the navigators, the drone crews, the research centre and the two presentation teams. The Alpha Jets are expected to serve to around 2035; asked what comes next, the ministry told the Assemblée nationale in April 2024 that the survival of the Patrouille de France is not in question and that options including a modular aircraft covering display, Red Air and complement roles are under study with the United Kingdom and Spain. Meanwhile the team spent June 2026 in the United States on Liberté 250.