Wonsan was a Japanese military aviation town before it was a Korean one. The Imperial Japanese Navy formed the Genzan Air Group (Genzan being the Japanese name for Wonsan) on 15 November 1940, with 33 Mitsubishi G3M bombers and 25 A5M fighters, according to English Wikipedia’s account drawn from standard histories of Japanese naval aviation. Its bombers took part in sinking the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya on 10 December 1941. Neither the English nor the Japanese Wikipedia article says whether the unit used today’s Kalma field, so the link is plausible but not established.

The Korean War brought the airfield into the open. English Wikipedia, citing the US Air Force historian Robert Futrell and the Marine Corps history by Charles Smith, says the South Korean Capital Division captured Wonsan airfield on 10 October 1950; by 12 October US Air Force cargo aircraft were flying supplies in. Maj. Gen. Field Harris, commander of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, arrived on 13 October, and VMF-312 and elements of Marine Aircraft Group 12 followed the next day. The Americans called the field K-25.

It did not last. After China entered the war, UN forces were ordered out of Wonsan, and the evacuation on 9 December 1950 lifted 7,009 refugees, 3,384 military personnel, 1,146 vehicles and 10,013 tons of cargo, according to English Wikipedia’s article on the Blockade of Wonsan. For the rest of the war the town was under a naval blockade and bombardment, and the airfield returned to North Korean hands.

In July 2013 Kim Jong Un approved plans to turn the military airfield into an international civil airport, part of his plan for a beach resort zone on the Kalma peninsula. English Wikipedia names the Chinese firm PLT Planning & Architecture as designer and puts the cost at about US$200 million. A single L-shaped terminal with two jet bridges replaced the older buildings and opened in September 2015; the first commercial flight, an aviation tour with thirty passengers, arrived on 24 September 2015.

The runway work took longer. Korean Wikipedia describes a new eastern runway, 15L/33R, 3,500 m long, built from early 2014 to late 2018 some 210 m from the old military runway, which it says was itself extended to 3,125 m as 15R/33L. English Wikipedia instead says the old runway became a taxiway. The two accounts cannot both be right, and North Korea publishes no aerodrome data that would settle it.

Civil traffic stayed thin. NK Pro reported in October 2017, two years after the opening, that there was still no international flight activity. In early 2018 an Asiana Airlines A321 became the first foreign airliner to use the rebuilt airport, on an inter-Korean flight to Yangyang in South Korea reported on 1 February 2018 (via Wikipedia). English Wikipedia, citing NK News of 15 April 2026, says satellite imagery showed the runway being extended again and the airport upgraded in 2026.

On the last weekend of September 2016 Kalma held the Wonsan International Friendship Air Festival, the first air show North Korea had ever staged for foreigners. The Aviationist’s David Cenciotti listed the military participants as MiG-29 Fulcrums, Su-25 Frogfoots, MiG-21bis Fishbeds, Mi-8T Hips and Y-5s, with four Hughes 500E helicopters flying in formation — the same type North Korea had obtained illegally from the United States in the 1980s. Air Koryo showed its Tu-134s, Tu-154s and Il-62s.

English Wikipedia counts about 200 international enthusiasts and 10,000 to 15,000 local spectators. The timing was awkward: the show came weeks after North Korea’s fifth nuclear test. A second festival was set for 23–24 September 2017, with MiG-23s promised, but it was cancelled in August 2017 "for geopolitical reasons", according to NK News and the South China Morning Post as cited by Wikipedia. There has been no other.

Kim Jong Un returned the air force to Kalma for its 80th anniversary on Friday 28 November 2025. The War Zone’s Thomas Newdick, working from state media imagery, identified Su-25s, MiG-29s, MiG-23s, the Il-76 airborne early warning conversion and the Saetbyol-4 and Saetbyol-9 drones, copies of the American Global Hawk and Reaper. Three new air-launched weapons were shown: a box-bodied cruise missile with pop-out wings, a small anti-armour missile carried in threes, and a short-range air-to-air missile.

The speech mattered more than the hardware. As quoted by The War Zone from state media, Kim said the air force would receive "new strategic military assets" and that his "expectations … for the air force, which will play a role in the exercise of the nuclear war deterrent, are very great". 38 North’s Vann Van Diepen judged in January 2026 that air-delivered nuclear weapons would remain secondary to North Korea’s missiles. Nothing in the reporting says that nuclear weapons are, or will be, stored at Kalma.