The government bought the land in November 1940: a little over one square kilometre of farmland near the Virginia coast. Asphalt runways were laid from December 1940 and finished by November 1941, and the field started with 32 officers and 172 enlisted men. In 1943 Congress approved an expansion for up to 160 officers and 800 men and longer runways.

The jet age made it. In the 1950s the Navy designated Oceana a master jet base, a home station for the tactical squadrons of the Atlantic Fleet, and it became a full naval air station. It now covers 6,820 acres including the Dam Neck Annex, with four runways — one of 12,000 ft and three of 8,000 ft — and uses Naval Auxiliary Landing Field Fentress in Chesapeake for carrier landing practice. Its airfield is named after Admiral Apollo Soucek, who set a world altitude record of 43,166 ft in 1930.

VF-101 converted to the Tomcat in 1976, and for thirty years Oceana was the Tomcat’s East Coast home. The Navy retired the F-14 at Oceana on 22 September 2006. The last F-14D, BuNo 164603, was ferried to Republic Airport on Long Island for display at Northrop Grumman’s site.

Today the base is, in effect, the Atlantic home of the Super Hornet. Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic commands all East Coast Super Hornet squadrons, and VFA-106 trains their crews. Wikipedia counts about 250 aircraft and 14 deployable strike fighter squadrons, and the headquarters of four carrier air wings, CVW-1, CVW-3, CVW-7 and CVW-8. With families, about 20,000 people depend on the station.

Virginia Beach grew up around the fence, and that nearly cost the city its base. In the 2005 base closure round the commission set Oceana a condition: unless the city condemned about 3,400 homes in the crash zones, the jets should go to the former NAS Cecil Field in Florida. Navy leaders did not want to move; Jacksonville withdrew in October 2005, and in November 2006 local voters chose to keep Cecil Field under civilian control. Oceana stayed.

The risks are not abstract. On 6 April 2012 a VFA-106 F/A-18D lost both engines after take-off and crashed into the Mayfair Mews apartments; both pilots ejected and no one died. In May 2017 about 94,000 US gallons of jet fuel leaked from a storage tank into Wolfsnare Creek. The Navy’s plan for a new outlying landing field to take carrier practice away from Fentress met fierce opposition from 2006 and was cancelled in November 2013.

The air wings headquartered at Oceana carried much of the Red Sea campaign. Carrier Air Wing 3, on Dwight D. Eisenhower from 14 October 2023 to 14 July 2024, flew 80 to 120 sorties a day against Houthi drones and missiles over the Red Sea and Yemen, and its commander, Rear Admiral Marc Miguez, said the air wing fired at least 80 air-to-air missiles and 350 air-to-surface weapons.

Carrier Air Wing 1 followed on Harry S. Truman, and paid for the pace. Between 22 December 2024 and 6 May 2025 Truman lost three Super Hornets, none to the enemy: an F/A-18F shot down in error by the cruiser USS Gettysburg, an F/A-18E that went over the side from the hangar bay, and an F/A-18F lost after an arresting gear failure. All the aircrew survived. The Navy’s investigations, reported by USNI News in December 2025, found failures behind each loss.

The strain did not end with the Houthi ceasefire of May 2025. Gerald R. Ford, whose air wing, CVW-8, is also headquartered at Oceana, flew in Operation Epic Fury against Iran from 28 February 2026 and came home in May 2026 after a 326-day deployment, a record according to USNI News, which also reported that carrier deployments since October 2023 had averaged 8.5 months.