Campo de Mayo grew up as a training ground for the army: Congress authorised it on 8 August 1901, and the land was bought in 1910, Wikipedia records. The army’s first air service had its school at El Palomar from 1912, a few kilometres away, but that service, its aircraft and its airfields passed to the new Air Force in 1945. When the army re-established its own aviation in 1956, it built it at Campo de Mayo, and the arm’s headquarters has been there since.

Wikipedia lists the Army Aviation Group 601 at Campo de Mayo with seven units: the Assault Helicopter Battalion 601, the Supply and Maintenance Battalion 601, the Intelligence Support Aviation Squadron 601, the Combat Support Aviation Battalion 601, the Exploration and Attack Squadron 602, the General Support Squadron 603 and the Support Squadron 604. The Army Aviation School is here too. Since 2009 it has trained helicopter pilots for the navy and air force as well, while fixed-wing training goes to the Air Force Academy at Córdoba.

Under the dictatorship Campo de Mayo held four secret detention centres, among them El Campito, according to Wikipedia. On 4 July 2022 the Federal Oral Court No. 2 of San Martín sentenced Santiago Omar Riveros, the former head of Military Institutes at Campo de Mayo, and Luis del Valle Arce, Delsis Ángel Malacalza and Eduardo María Lance, commander, second commander and operations officer of Army Aviation Battalion 601, to life imprisonment.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office summarises the court’s finding: four people — Rosa Eugenia Novillo Corvalán, Roberto Ramón Arancibia, Adrián Enrique Accrescimbeni and Juan Carlos Rosace — were held, tortured and then put aboard Twin Otter and Fiat aircraft and thrown into the sea or the Río de la Plata in 1976–1977. Wikipedia’s article on the death flights names Battalion 601 as the unit set up to carry them out. These are the findings of Argentine courts and are reported here as such.

In 1982 the 601 Army Aviation Battalion sent two CH-47C Chinooks, three A109As, six SA330L Pumas and nine UH-1Hs to the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), according to Wikipedia, where they flew 796 general support flights. Six army aviators were killed. The two Wikipedia articles that count the losses do not agree in detail — one gives two shot down, six destroyed on the ground and ten captured, the other four destroyed on the ground and eleven captured plus Pumas lost to a Sea Dart and a Stinger — but both show that almost the whole force was lost.

The loss still shapes the base. Zona Militar recalled in October 2025 that the Chinooks stayed on the islands and that the army never recovered them, and quoted the then Army Chief of Staff, Lt Gen Carlos Alberto Presti, that the army had lost its medium and heavy helicopter capacity more than 40 years earlier. The UH-60, second-hand CH-47F and ex-German CH-53G were being studied in 2025–2026.

The field is busy with Hueys and light helicopters. On 12 September 2024 the army presented its Diamond DA62 MPP here, a EUR 7.8 million reconnaissance and mapping aircraft with LIDAR and photogrammetric sensors, before the Defence Minister and the Army Chief of Staff, Zona Militar reported. In late 2025 Squadron 602 certified rockets and gun pods on its UH-1Hs at Monte Caseros, and from 25 February to 2 March 2026 three Huey IIs of Battalion 601 and an AB 206B1 of Squadron 602 left Campo de Mayo for the joint exercise CANDU IV on the Atlantic coast.

The base’s units also work far from Buenos Aires. From late December 2024 UH-1Hs of Battalion 601 and Squadron 602, with the Mountain Army Aviation Section 6, carried firefighters, recovered personnel and flew thermal-camera reconnaissance over the Nahuel Huapi and Lanín national parks from El Bolsón, Bariloche and San Martín de los Andes, Zona Militar reported. The question hanging over the field is what will replace the Hueys: in August 2026 Army Aviation staff visited a Colombian Black Hawk unit, though Zona Militar stressed that no decision had been taken.