Ilopango sits on the eastern edge of San Salvador, at 618 metres. For decades it was both the country’s gateway and its air force base. English Wikipedia records that the first jet airliner to land there, a Pan Am Boeing 707-321B, arrived on 27 April 1964, and that the airport served the capital until 1980, when the larger El Salvador International Airport at Comalapa took over the airlines.

The air force stayed. The FAS’s own history of the brigade traces its maintenance organisation at Ilopango through the 1940s and 1950s: more mechanics in 1947, an aviation mechanics company in 1955, and in 1960 a group combining maintenance, supply, radio and transport. When Comalapa became a second air base in 1988, part of that support group moved there. Today Ilopango is used for military, air taxi and charter flying, a new civil terminal opened on 7 December 2023, and the old terminal houses the National Aviation Museum.

The war with Honduras began with a Salvadoran raid on Toncontín on the evening of 14 July 1969, and Honduras struck back the next day. The FAS history says two Honduran aircraft attacked Ilopango and Acajutla on 15 July, dropping four bombs on Ilopango with minimal damage, and that Captains Héctor Leonel Lobo Pérez and Douglas Vladimir Varela Moreno went up to intercept. English Wikipedia adds that the Honduran raids on the oil installations at Acajutla and Cutuco cost El Salvador 20 per cent of its fuel reserves.

Varela Moreno was killed two days later, shot down over Honduras. Every claim from that week is a claim by one side; the FAS and Honduran accounts are set out on the air force page.

The People’s Revolutionary Army, one of the FMLN’s five groups, sent a special forces team into Ilopango and placed explosive charges on the parked aircraft. The Washington Post, reporting the next day, said the explosions began at about 1:30 in the morning and that even aircraft inside hangars were badly damaged; sources close to the military told it at least five of the 14 American UH-1H helicopters and three of about 16 French-built jets had been hit. The Defence Minister, General José Guillermo García, called it a terrorist act and declined to give figures.

The FAS history, written later, says more than half the fleet was destroyed. The historian James Corum lists five Ouragans, six Hueys and three C-47s destroyed and five more aircraft badly damaged. The attack changed the war: within six months the United States had delivered six A-37Bs, four O-2As and two C-123Ks, and the helicopter fleet that had been cut on the Ilopango ramp grew to 46 by the end of 1984.

Ilopango was formally designated the First Air Brigade on 4 March 1994, two years after the peace accords, with Major Milton Antonio Andrade Cabrera as its first commander. Its Operations Group has two squadrons, helicopters and transport; a Material and Combat Support Group maintains the aircraft; and a Base Air Group includes a security battalion of four rifle companies and an anti-aircraft battery, the fruit of the lesson of 1982.

The brigade’s official mission is to provide the ground forces with manoeuvre, limited close air support and transport of equipment and personnel, in peace and war. In practice that means the UH-1H and Bell 412 helicopters that fly disaster relief, security operations and VIP transport, and the Arava and Caravan transports. The fighter-bombers left for Comalapa in the late 1980s.

The move was gradual. The FAS history of the Second Air Brigade records that 108 aircraft technicians were transferred from Ilopango to the new base on 1 April 1986, that the base was created by general order on 1 August 1986 but was run from Ilopango at first, and that maintenance and armament work only began at Comalapa on 13 April 1988. Since then Ilopango has been the brigade of the helicopters and transports, and Comalapa that of the jets.