Work on the airfield outside Pápa, a market town in western Transdanubia, began in 1936, during the years when Hungary was rebuilding an air force that the Treaty of Trianon had forbidden. According to the Hungarian Defence Forces’ own unit history, two bomber squadrons of the Royal Hungarian Air Force moved in during 1937. The site had room to grow on the flat land between the Bakony hills and the Rába valley, and it did.

Pápa is also where Hungary’s parachute troops began. The English Wikipedia dates the first parachute company to 1 October 1939, under Captain Árpád Bertalan; the official unit history speaks of the First Royal Hungarian Parachute Battalion formed in 1939 under his command. The two accounts describe the same unit at different stages, and the town still treats the paratroopers as part of its military tradition.

During the Second World War German and Hungarian flying units used the airfield, and by 1944, according to the English Wikipedia, it was the largest base of the Royal Hungarian Air Force. That claim is not repeated in the official history, which is more reticent about the war years. What both agree on is how the period ended: Soviet forces took the airfield in 1945 and stationed a fighter regiment there.

For sixteen years after the war Pápa was a Soviet fighter base. In 1961 the Hungarian and Soviet commands agreed to swap garrisons: the Soviet regiment left, and the Hungarian fighter regiment stationed at Sármellék moved to Pápa, a transfer also recorded in Szabó’s 2020 survey of former Soviet airfields. The regiment traced its lineage to the 24th Fighter Regiment, founded at Szentkirályszabadja in 1950.

The newcomers brought Hungary’s first supersonic fighter, the MiG-21. The English Wikipedia, used here as a finding aid, lists the MiG-21F at first, the MiG-21MF from 1974 and the MiG-21bis from 1978, with a squadron converting to the MiG-23 in 1979, and runway renovations in 1962 and 1984. As the 47th Fighter Regiment, later the 47th Pápa Tactical Air Regiment, it was one of the three MiG-21 regiments that formed the backbone of Hungarian air defence.

The base produced two cosmonauts. Captains Bertalan Farkas and Béla Magyari, both Pápa pilots, were selected for the Interkosmos programme in 1978, and on 26 May 1980 Farkas launched from Baikonur on Soyuz 36 with Valery Kubasov, becoming the first Hungarian in space. Magyari was his back-up. Farkas had flown at Pápa from 1972 to 1978.

The end came with the post-Cold War cuts and the choice of the Gripen. The 47th regiment was disbanded on 30 June 2001; the official history calls it the close of the Pápa chapter in several decades of Hungarian fighter aviation. The MiG-21 on the roundabout at the Route 83 junction, serial 4605, unveiled on 2 April 2019, flew from 1971 to 1990.

The Pápa Air Base was formed on 1 July 2001, the day after the regiment disappeared, but without resident aircraft its future was uncertain. Colonel László Gangler, a later commander, described the starting point on the Defence Forces’ recruiting site as an almost pre-closure state in 2001, from which the base climbed back through investments, reorganisations and renovations.

The rescue was the Strategic Airlift Capability. A group of NATO and partner nations that could not afford strategic airlifters on their own signed a letter of intent in September 2006 and a memorandum of understanding on 23 September 2008. Pápa was chosen as the main operating base; the English Wikipedia article on the town dates the selection to 18 November 2007, while the official unit history gives 2008, probably the year the choice was formalised.

The first C-17, SAC 01, arrived on 14 July 2009. On 27 July, in front of NATO Deputy Secretary General Claudio Bisogniero, Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and Defence Minister Imre Szekeres, the Heavy Airlift Wing was activated and its flag handed to its first commander, Colonel John Zazworsky of the US Air Force. Bajnai called it a very historic moment, ten years after Hungary joined NATO. The third aircraft arrived on 12 October 2009.

The wing flew its first operational mission, Ramstein to Pristina, on 13 August 2009 and its first Afghanistan mission in late September. It declared initial operational capability on 25 May 2010 and full operational capability on 14 November 2012, by which time the Ministry of Defence counted more than 8,000 flying hours, 53,000 tonnes of cargo and 32,000 passengers.

The Heavy Airlift Wing is multinational, not Hungarian. Its members are Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and the United States, with NATO partners Finland and Sweden, which have since joined the alliance. The aircraft are owned through the NATO Airlift Management Programme, and each nation buys a share of the flying hours and sends personnel in proportion to it.

The wing’s own site puts its staff at about 150 people; the English Wikipedia gives 145–155, and in July 2012 the local paper counted 131. Command rotates among the four largest shareholders: US Air Force colonels alternate with colonels from Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway, each serving two years as vice commander and two as commander. The wing has a heavy airlift squadron, a command and control squadron, a logistics support squadron and a command staff group.

Hungary’s own share is small. In 2021 the defence ministry’s magazine counted three Hungarian military posts in the wing, a co-pilot, a ground crew member and a legal officer, plus three Hungarian civilians handling diplomatic clearances. In 2012 the paper named First Lieutenant Viktor Lukács as the country’s only C-17 pilot. Hungary’s larger contribution is the base itself, run by the Hungarian Defence Forces as host nation for the other eleven.

The aircraft are registered and flagged in Hungary and carry Hungarian military insignia, which often leads to them being mistaken for Hungarian Air Force transports. The ministry magazine reported about 2,800 flying hours a year across the three aircraft, against a design figure of 3,000, with each jet going to the United States for a six-month overhaul every six years.

Once the airlifters had come, NATO common funding and the member nations rebuilt the base around them. A new control tower opened in December 2015. In September 2016 the commander, Colonel Gangler, told the county paper that more than 6,000 people had been given site passes for construction in the previous 18 months, and that apart from the space shuttle practically anything could land at Pápa.

The SAC moved into a new campus in May 2016, with offices, a warehouse, a vehicle maintenance station, an aerial port and what the programme calls the continent’s largest purpose-built C-17 hangar, formally opened on 17 November 2016. A passenger terminal able to handle 400 people at a time, and up to 2,000 a day, opened on 2 April 2019. In October 2017 the commander described a three-phase plan that included lengthening the runway by 600 metres; whether that extension has been completed is not confirmed in the sources read for this page.

On 19 June 2024 the wing received a Combined Aerial Port Facility: a 3,200-square-metre warehouse with offices and a 33-metre parachute drying tower, built over two years for EUR 10 million shared by the twelve nations and managed by the NATO Support and Procurement Agency. The wing commander, Colonel Jason Mills, said the tower would allow parachute operations in any weather.

The last piece was training. The cornerstone of a 1,438-square-metre C-17 simulator building, put up by STRABAG on the old fighter parking area, was laid on 11 January 2024, and it opened on 27 May 2025. Until then crews had travelled to the United States and the United Kingdom for up to 35 days of simulator training a year.

Beneath the NATO wing sits a Hungarian unit with its own tasks: keeping Pápa ready as a reserve airfield, supporting any flying from it, helping aircraft in distress, providing air search and rescue for western Hungary and host-nation support for allied forces. It was raised to regiment level on 1 August 2017, became the MH 47. Bázisrepülőtér on 1 January 2023 and returned to the name MH Pápa Bázisrepülőtér on 1 September 2026. Its commander is Colonel Sándor Barta.

Hungarian aircraft use the base too. In May 2019 the Gripens and the quick reaction alert pair moved from Kecskemét to Pápa for at least six months while Kecskemét’s runway was rebuilt, and in 2024 the ministry reported that Pápa was maintaining Hungary’s first KC-390 alongside the C-17s and refuelling and supporting H145M and H225M helicopters.

The base marked its 25th anniversary in July 2026. Its chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Zoltán Kondor, called the jubilee both a reckoning and a new beginning. At the family day on 5 September 2026 visitors could walk through a C-17 while Gripens flew past, a fair picture of a Hungarian air base that now lives mainly by hosting other nations’ aircraft.