Eskişehir’s military flying begins with the air school. After the War of Independence the young Republic regrouped its scattered air units, and in 1925 two aircraft companies were moved to Eskişehir, where the air school was reorganised, according to the Türkiye Maarif Encyclopedia. English Wikipedia’s Air Force Academy article dates the move to 1926 and names Captain Muzaffer Göksenin as the first director; the sources differ by a year, so the start is best given as 1925–1926.

The school trained the generation that built the Republic’s air arm. From 1932 the air regiments were treated as a separate combat arm and trained their own personnel. Eskişehir was home to the 1st Airplane Regiment, and it was here that Sabiha Gökçen, adopted daughter of Atatürk, took a special eleven-month course at the Tayyare Mektebi in 1936–1937, followed by six months of war-pilot training with the regiment.

Gökçen is celebrated in Turkey as the first woman military pilot. Her record has a darker side that a base page should not skip: in 1937 she flew in the Dersim operations, a campaign in which large numbers of civilians were killed and for which the Turkish state apologised in 2011. The service file for the Turkish Air Force carries that history in full.

The schools at Eskişehir were merged into the Air Force Academy, which began teaching on 1 October 1951 with 58 cadets (Türkiye Maarif Encyclopedia). Its first 56 graduates were commissioned on 30 August 1953. On 17 September 1954 the academy moved to İzmir, and on 4 July 1967 to Yeşilyurt in Istanbul. Eskişehir’s role changed from teaching pilots to fighting with them.

When Turkey joined NATO in 1952 the modernisation of its air force accelerated, and its combat units were grouped into numbered tactical air forces. Eskişehir became the headquarters of the 1st Tactical Air Force, later the 1st Air Force Command; the city’s own Wikipedia article describes the base as the command centre of Turkey’s first Tactical Air Force headquarters on NATO’s southern flank during the Cold War.

NATO also kept a Combined Air Operations Centre here. CAOC 6 at Eskişehir was one of the alliance’s regional air control centres until 2013, when its responsibility passed to the CAOC at Torrejón in Spain as part of NATO’s command structure reform. The Turkish national centre, known by its Turkish acronym BHHM (Birleştirilmiş Hava Harekât Merkezi, Combined Air Operations Center), remained at Eskişehir and continued to build the air picture for Turkish airspace.

In 2014 the old numbered air forces were merged. The Combat Air Force and Air Missile Defence Command was formed on 5 August 2014 to bring the fighting units under one headquarters, and it sits at Eskişehir. English Wikipedia’s articles disagree on the details: one says both commands were already at Eskişehir, another that the headquarters moved there from Diyarbakır after the 2016 coup attempt. What is not disputed is that the base today is the operational brain of the Turkish combat air force.

That role explains why the 1st Main Jet Base Command is more than a flying station. The airfield, the operations centre and the command staff sit together. On the night of 15 July 2016 that concentration mattered: it was on the radars of the Eskişehir BHHM that unaccounted-for, uncontrolled flights began to appear one after another, as Sedat Ergin later wrote in Hürriyet.

The Phantom arrived at Eskişehir first. The infrastructure of the 1st Main Jet Base was modernised, and the first pair of F-4Es landed on 30 August 1974, Victory Day, weeks after the Turkish intervention in Cyprus. Six more followed that year. On 5 February 1975 the United States halted deliveries under its arms embargo over Cyprus; the remaining aircraft of the first batch arrived only after the embargo was lifted, according to The Unit Report.

Further batches followed: 32 F-4Es and eight RF-4Es between 1978 and 1979, second-hand USAF and Air National Guard aircraft in the 1980s, 40 more after the Gulf War and RF-4Es from the German Luftwaffe from 1992. At the peak eight Turkish squadrons flew the type, three of them at Eskişehir: 111, 112 and 113 Filo, the last a reconnaissance unit with the RF-4E.

The aircraft still flying are the F-4E 2020 Terminator. Israel Aerospace Industries won a contract in August 1995, reported at 600 million dollars, to upgrade 54 aircraft; work began in January 1997, 26 airframes were modified in Israel and 28 in Turkey, and the first entered service on 27 January 2000 with 111 and 171 Filo. In 2006 the air force’s overhaul centre at Eskişehir and ASELSAN upgraded another 16 F-4Es under the Şimşek (Lightning) project.

The Phantom’s last years have been hard. Six airmen died in Turkish Phantom crashes between 24 February and 5 March 2015, two of them in an F-4E that had taken off from Eskişehir. The RF-4E was withdrawn from 12 March 2015. Today only 111 Filo and the 401 test squadron fly the F-4E 2020, both at Eskişehir; The Unit Report expects the type to serve until about 2030, to be replaced by KAAN, F-16 Block 70 or Eurofighter Typhoon.

401 Test Filo, nicknamed Rüya (Dream), is the air force’s test and evaluation squadron. English Wikipedia describes its job as testing locally produced and developed weapons and ammunition, and a CNN Türk documentary broadcast in June 2019 showed it integrating and test-firing new national weapon systems on fighters. F-16.net lists it on F-16C/Ds of Blocks 30 and 40; The Unit Report says it also flies the F-4E 2020.

The squadron’s best documented work is the GÖKTUĞ programme of TÜBİTAK SAGE, which produced the long-range, radar-guided GÖKDOĞAN and the short-range, infrared-guided BOZDOĞAN air-to-air missiles. In September 2020 the Ministry of National Defence said test flights were being conducted by 401 Test Squadron with support from 101 Air Refuelling Squadron. The project had begun in 2013 and was intended for the F-16.

Eskişehir is also an industrial town for aviation. The city’s Wikipedia article calls it the site of Turkey’s first aviation industry, the Aeronautical Supply Maintenance Centre, the air force depot that later carried out the Şimşek Phantom upgrade. Next door stands TEI (TUSAŞ Engine Industries), founded in 1985 by TUSAŞ, GE Aerospace, the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation and the Turkish Aeronautical Association.

TEI delivered its first engines and engine parts in 1987 and today reports more than 3,600 employees and over 485 million dollars in annual exports, with work on engine modules for civil programmes such as LEAP and GE9X. Its head office is on the Eskişehir ring road in the Tepebaşı district, so the city that once trained Turkey’s pilots now also builds parts of the engines they fly behind.

The coup attempt of 15 July 2016 was fought partly in the air, and Eskişehir stood on the government’s side. The plotters took the Air Force Operation Center in Ankara and controlled Akıncı, Kayseri Erkilet, İncirlik, Balıkesir and Denizli-Çardak. The Combined Air Operations Center in Eskişehir, wrote Hürriyet columnist Sedat Ergin, stayed largely in the hands of officers loyal to the constitution and to the Air Force Commander, General Abidin Ünal.

Ünal himself was not free. He was seized at gunpoint at the wedding of the daughter of General Mehmet Şanver, commander of the Eskişehir combat air command, on the Anatolian side of Istanbul. Coup soldiers arrived in five helicopters, took the guests hostage and flew commanders to the Akıncı base in Ankara, the headquarters of the attempt, Hürriyet Daily News reported on 18 July 2016.

According to Ergin’s reconstruction, an instruction was dictated to Eskişehir by phone at 23:51 and passed to all units: the Air Force Operation Center had been overtaken and all orders were to come from the Air Force Commander through the Eskişehir Operation Center. Through the night the two centres fought over Turkish airspace, with Eskişehir refusing clearances and trying to block the plotters’ tanker and transport landings.

Ergin describes the dialogues of that night as a struggle between the operations centre in Ankara and the one in Eskişehir over control of Turkish airspace, with Ankara straining to get aircraft airborne and Eskişehir trying to obstruct them. In the reorganisation that followed the coup attempt, F-16.net records that Eskişehir’s 113 Filo took over the traditions of Akıncı’s disbanded 142 Filo.

Eskişehir’s operations centre has also served diplomacy. When the Syrian ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia took effect on 30 December 2016, Hürriyet Daily News reported that Turkey would monitor it from a centre at the Eskişehir main air base, and Russia from Hmeimim in Syria. A hot line linked the two. Groups listed as terrorist by the UN Security Council, including ISIL and al-Nusra, were excluded.

The line was tested within weeks. On 9 February 2017 a Russian air strike near al-Bab killed three Turkish soldiers and wounded 11. According to the Turkish statement quoted by Hürriyet Daily News, the Eskişehir base, the designated coordination centre, had identified on 8 February that a rocket had been launched at friendly forces. On 17 February the paper reported that Turkey was relaying updated coordinates of its troops through the Eskişehir-Hmeimim hot line to prevent a repeat.

In October 2025 the base received a different kind of visitor. As part of the confidence-building measures between Türkiye and Greece, a delegation from the Hellenic Air Force’s 111 Combat Wing at Nea Anchialos visited the 1st Main Jet Base at Eskişehir on 20 and 22 October, Hürriyet Daily News reported. Both governments present such visits as part of the post-2023 thaw; their positions on the Aegean disputes themselves remain unchanged.