Albanian military aviation dates its birth to 24 April 1951, when Peço Polena made the first flight, and its first combat squadron of twelve Yak-9s flew from the Lapraka field in Tirana. The jet age arrived four years later at Kuçovë. On 15 May 1955 the “23 Peza” Aviation Regiment was formed here, and the Ministry of Defence still calls it the first unit of Albanian military aviation charged with protecting the country’s airspace. Its first equipment was the MiG-15, supplied while Albania was still in the Soviet camp.

Kuçovë was an obvious choice. The town sits on the Kuçova oil field, where Albania’s first oil well was drilled in 1928, and under the communist regime it was renamed Qyteti Stalin. After the break with Moscow in the early 1960s the Air Force turned to China, and Kuçovë flew Chinese-built copies of Soviet designs. Wikipedia’s account of the Gjadër base records a squadron of Shenyang F-6s, the Chinese MiG-19, moving from Kuçovë to the new northern base on 16 October 1976, which shows the type was flying here by then.

The regiment survived the fall of communism and was renamed Kuçovë Air Base in 1995. But the fleet was ageing with no replacement in sight. In November 2018 Defence Minister Olta Xhaçka, presenting the defence budget at the base itself, reminded her audience that the last flight had been made in October 2005, after which the sky over Kuçovë fell silent. Wikipedia dates the withdrawal of the last fighter jets to 2004; the ministry’s date for the final flight from Kuçovë is October 2005.

The revival began as an Alliance project rather than a national one. In August 2018 Prime Minister Edi Rama announced that NATO would invest more than 50 million euros in the first phase of modernising Kuçovë, and the ministry dates the joint NATO and Albanian decision to convert it into a tactical Alliance base to the same year. In May 2020 the ministry reported a NATO allocation of 51 million euros, with the NATO Support and Procurement Agency handling the project, and Defence Minister Xhaçka said the base was closer to rebirth than ever.

Dates for the start of work differ by source. NATO says renovation began with a ground-breaking ceremony in 2019. In February 2021 Defence Minister Niko Peleshi said work on the ground would begin that autumn, and the ministry held a formal start-of-works ceremony with the prime minister on 20 January 2022, when it gave the investment as about 45.8 million euros and set a completion target of autumn 2023.

The scope was a complete rebuild: reconstruction of the runway and control tower, a new aircraft parking area, fuel storage, ammunition depots and loading stations, and a fire and crash rescue station. Peleshi said at the ceremony that the base sent a clear message to actors with ill intentions in the Western Balkans. The project ran a few months late; the ministry published the first pictures from inside the rebuilt base in February 2024.

Kuçovë reopened on 4 March 2024. The guests included President Bajram Begaj, Prime Minister Rama, Speaker Lindita Nikolla, Defence Minister Peleshi and Italy’s defence minister Guido Crosetto, the commander of NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre at Torrejón, General Juan Pablo Sánchez de Lara, and the general manager of the NATO Support and Procurement Agency. After the speeches allied aircraft flew a display; the Albanian ministry lists Eurofighters, F-16s and Black Hawk helicopters.

NATO described the project as its largest in Albania for a decade, costing about 50 million euros through the NATO Security Investment Programme, with renewed runways, control tower, hangars and storage. It said the base would support logistics, air operations and training for the Alliance as well as Albania’s own needs. Albanian officials added that the government had put in more than 5 million euros of its own.

The Air Force commander, Brigadier General Ferdinant Dimo, had spelled out the intended role a week earlier: Albanian Air Force troops would train at Kuçovë, and NATO troops and aircraft could be accommodated, trained and flown from it. What the base does not have is an Albanian combat aircraft to fly from it; the fighters at the opening were visitors.

The first Albanian aircraft to use the rebuilt runway were unmanned. Albania signed an agreement with Turkey’s Baykar for Bayraktar TB2 drones on 20 December 2022 and released the first imagery from its three TB2s on 30 June 2024. That August, the ministry said, the drones had been flying for days in joint operations against wildfires and would soon move to round-the-clock monitoring; pilots had completed night-flying training.

The same summer Kuçovë became a firefighting hub. On 14 August 2024 two Romanian aircraft, a C-27J and a C-130, arrived to fight fires, their crews deployed to the base for about a week. In the 2025 fire season the drones again surveyed burned areas in the south of the country.

Building work did not stop in 2024. In February 2025 the ministry reported a drone maintenance facility nearing completion and training facilities rebuilt; in March 2025, inspecting the base with the prime minister, Defence Minister Pirro Vengu described a second NATO-supported phase with a fortified ammunition and weapons depot, a finished training centre and 350 personnel, and mentioned guided bombs and loitering munitions received from Turkey. A tender for a perimeter road, underpass and fibre-optic network followed in December 2025. On 30 April 2026 the Air Force held its 75th anniversary ceremony at Kuçovë.