Boufarik sits in the Mitidja, the flat and fertile plain behind Algiers, a few kilometres from the older military airfield at Blida. The sources checked do not date its construction; they agree only that it was a French military airfield before 1962. When the Allies landed in North Africa on 8 November 1942, the airfields named in the Operation Torch accounts around Algiers were Maison Blanche, captured at 06:00, and Blida, which surrendered the same day to a British aircraft that landed on it. Boufarik is not mentioned.

Its moment in the Second World War came a few months later. English Wikipedia says Charles de Gaulle landed at Boufarik from Gibraltar in 1943 and remained based in Algeria until mid-1944; it gives the date as 3 May, citing a personal essay rather than a history. De Gaulle’s own Wikipedia biography says only that he moved his headquarters to Algiers in May 1943, and the French Committee of National Liberation was formed in Algiers on 3 June 1943. The exact day of the landing is therefore not settled in the sources checked.

French Wikipedia says French forces evacuated the base on independence in 1962, after which it passed to the new Algerian air force.

Algeria does not publish a list of its air bases, let alone which squadrons fly from them. What is on the record is general: English Wikipedia calls Boufarik the home base of the air transport fleet, and French Wikipedia calls it the largest air base in the country and associates it with the Il-76, C-130 Hercules, CASA C295 and Beechcraft 1900. Neither cites an official source for this, and this page does not reproduce the squadron numbers that circulate online.

The scale of the fleet is better documented than its basing. FlightGlobal’s World Air Forces directory lists 11 Il-76TD/MD transports, 4 Il-78 tankers and 18 C-130s (14 C-130H and 4 C-130J) for the whole air force. The Il-78s were bought from Ukrainian surplus in 1998 and delivered by 2003, according to English Wikipedia.

The routes these aircraft fly are visible in the public AIP. Tindouf, Béchar, Tamanrasset and Ouargla, the southern and western garrison towns, are all listed as civil/military aerodromes with runways of 3,000 metres or more; Boufarik itself, like the fighter bases, is not in the AIP at all.

Shortly before 08:00 on Wednesday 11 April 2018 — Wikipedia gives the take-off time as 07:50 — Ilyushin Il-76TD 7T-WIV left Boufarik with 247 passengers and 10 crew. The Aviation Safety Network says it was bound for Tindouf and that the passengers were military personnel and their families heading for bases at Tindouf and Béchar; Al Jazeera, citing state television, gave the destination as Béchar. In its initial climb the aircraft came down in a field just outside the base perimeter, broke apart and burned. Nobody survived.

The dead included about 30 Sahrawis from the refugee camps near Tindouf. Ireland’s RTÉ, reporting on the day, said they had been in Algiers for medical treatment and that a Polisario Front official put 26 of the dead as members of the movement; Spain’s EFE agency, as cited by Wikipedia, reported only 30 Sahrawi civilian casualties. English Wikipedia counts 176 members of the People’s National Army among the dead.

Major General Boualem Madi confirmed the crash on state television. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared three days of national mourning, and Sahrawi President Brahim Ghali declared seven. The army chief of staff, Ahmed Gaid Salah, ordered an investigation, and Russia offered help. The findings were not found in the sources checked. With 257 dead it is the deadliest air crash on Algerian soil.

The 2018 crash was the second in four years to kill whole families on a military flight. On 11 February 2014 a C-130H-30, 7T-WHM, flying from Tamanrasset via Ouargla to Constantine with military families aboard, hit high ground near Aïn Kercha, about 30 km south of Constantine, during an ILS approach in rain and gusting wind. The Aviation Safety Network records 76 dead and one survivor among the 77 on board.

Neither flight started or ended at the same place, but both belong to the same system: the military airlift that moves soldiers and their dependants between the north and garrisons hundreds of kilometres into the desert, for which Boufarik is the northern terminus. English Wikipedia also reports a Beechcraft 1900D crash near Boufarik on 5 March 2026 with four killed; that report was not corroborated by an official or press source in this research and is given here as Wikipedia’s.