Bodø’s life as a military airfield began in the chaos of the Norwegian campaign. In May 1940, as German forces pushed north towards Narvik, a makeshift landing strip was laid at Hernes outside the town. According to the station history by Per I. Utgaard, summarised in English secondary sources, it was built of peat and wire netting, about 540 by 35 metres, in twelve days. It was meant to let British fighters support the Allied forces fighting further north.

From 21 May a detachment of Gloster Gladiators from No. 263 Squadron RAF operated from the strip, and Hurricanes of No. 46 Squadron are also recorded there. The little force could not hold back the Luftwaffe. On 27 May 1940, secondary sources record, ten Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers and four Messerschmitt Bf 110s attacked the airfield, and the town itself was bombed in the evening. Store norske leksikon records that in May 1940 large parts of Bodø were laid in ruins by German bombs during the fighting for the town.

German troops took the town on 1 June 1940, days before the Allies abandoned northern Norway. The occupiers used the area for their own airfield, and Store norske leksikon notes that the Norwegian Aviation Museum today stands on the site of a provisional landing strip from the occupation years. The wartime details of squadrons and aircraft numbers above come from a secondary account of Utgaard’s history and have not been checked against RAF records for this page.

After the war Bodø was chosen as the site for a large airfield serving both airlines and the air force. Store norske leksikon dates the official opening of Bodø airport to 25 April 1952, with the first domestic airline routes flying from two kilometres of new concrete runway from 12 May 1952. The military air station was ready in 1956 and, in the encyclopedia’s words, has since been the main air base for northern Norway. Secondary sources record NATO infrastructure works on the airfield in 1950 and 1951.

Secondary sources drawing on Utgaard give the build-up in more detail: the Storting made Bodø the main northern station in 1952, command moved from Bardufoss on 1 July 1953, and F-84G Thunderjets of 334 and 331 Squadrons arrived in the summer of 1955. F-86 Sabres followed in 1958, F-86K all-weather fighters in 1960 and the first F-104 Starfighters on 7 August 1963, when complaints about noise from the town began. These dates are secondary and SNL’s 1956 readiness date sits slightly after the reported 1955 arrivals.

The base grew into Norway’s largest air station. Store norske leksikon describes it as one of the country’s two peacetime fighter bases, sharing a concrete runway of just under 2,800 metres with the civil airport. Secondary sources describe underground aircraft hangars built in 1973–75 and a NATO-funded upgrade in 1989–93, but the counts they give, 16 and later 43, are inconsistent, and this page could not confirm whether any of them are true rock-cut hangars. SNL’s airport article gives the runway as 3,063/2,794 metres; the AIP figure of 2,794 metres is the one used on this site.

Bodø’s most famous flight never arrived. On 1 May 1960 Francis Gary Powers took off from Peshawar in a CIA U-2 on a reconnaissance flight across the Soviet Union and was shot down near Sverdlovsk, about 1,200 miles inside Soviet territory. The United States first put out a cover story on 3 May about a NASA weather aircraft. Then, speaking to the Supreme Soviet on 7 May, Khrushchev revealed that the pilot was alive and, as the US State Department’s official history records, that his landing destination was Bodø airfield in Norway.

The affair wrecked the Paris summit of 14–15 May 1960 and put Norway in an awkward position. NRK reports that Khrushchev threatened to drop atomic bombs on little Bodø, and English secondary sources describe it as the first Soviet threat to target Norway with nuclear weapons. The same reporting says U-2 aircraft had already flown from Bodø in 1958, and that the CIA asked for temporary use of the base in January 1960.

How much the Norwegian government knew is still disputed. Historian Karl Kleve told NRK that Norwegian authorities were involved in the U-2 flights twice, but that no official document shows the government knew, and that the one person who may have known was the intelligence chief Vilhelm Evang, who dealt directly with the Americans. The British author Chris Pocock has argued, citing a CIA document, that Norwegian authorities did know. NRK’s conclusion is that there is no certain answer, and Norway’s own intelligence archives from 1960 remain classified.

The quick reaction alert defined Bodø. Teknisk Ukeblad, describing the last months of the F-16 alert in November 2021, lists F-86Ks on the mission from 1960 to 1967 and F-104s from 1967 to 1982, before 331 and 334 Squadrons took it over with the F-16 in 1982. Two armed jets were kept ready around the clock and had to be in the air within 15 minutes, to identify Soviet and later Russian bombers, maritime patrol and intelligence aircraft flying along the Norwegian coast.

The F-16 era at Bodø is dated slightly differently in different sources. Teknisk Ukeblad places the first Norwegian F-16 at Rygge on 15 January 1980; secondary sources give February 1982 for the first F-16 at Bodø, while other summaries put 331 Squadron’s conversion in 1981. The last Starfighter, a CF-104, is reported to have retired in April 1983. Norway’s F-16 buy is given as 72 aircraft by Teknisk Ukeblad and 74 in other summaries that count two later attrition replacements.

When Ørland became the F-35 base, Bodø became the F-16’s last home. On 1 April 2019 the remaining 57 aircraft were concentrated there under 331 Squadron and 338 Squadron was stood down. The then Chief of the Air Force, Major General Tonje Skinnarland, said the F-16 would remain a significant part of Norway’s operational capability until the F-35 took over. By the end, Teknisk Ukeblad counted 17 Norwegian F-16s lost over the type’s career, while noting that the air force had lost no fighter in more than twenty years and had not had a fatal accident in 32 years.

The last F-16 alert take-off came on Thursday 6 January 2022, when F-35s at Evenes took over the mission. Janes, reporting the retirement of the 57 F-16AM/BMs after 42 years, gives 1 January 2022 as the retirement date; Forsvarets forum’s account of the final take-off fixes the handover itself at 6 January. Official Bodø-era intercept totals were not found for this page; for comparison, the F-35s at Evenes flew 38 scrambles against 69 Russian aircraft in 2024.

The decision that ended Bodø as a fighter base was taken in June 2012. The Storting’s committee recommendation on the long-term defence plan, Innst. 388 S (2011–2012) of 7 June 2012, endorsed a fighter organisation of two squadrons at a main base at Ørland, with a forward operating base at Evenes, and stated plainly that the recommended solution meant closing Bodø main air station. Structural measures including the closure were expected to free up to NOK 100 million a year in net savings.

The choice was contested in the north. In the committee remarks a Christian Democrat member said she would seek a solution in which alert and training activity in the north could continue from Bodø. The majority instead backed Ørland as the main base and Evenes as the forward base in the north, with base investments put at about NOK 5.1 billion.

Store norske leksikon records that the main air station was closed in 2022, about ten years after the Storting’s decision, and that the remaining establishment had been renamed Luftforsvarets base Bodø in 2016. The civil side is also changing: the Solberg government decided in 2017 to build a new Bodø airport, with the runway moved 900 metres closer to the sea and capacity for 2.3 million passengers a year.

The base did not empty. Forsvaret’s station page lists the air force leadership, the rescue helicopter service, the Cyber Defence Force, the Defence Estates Agency and a logistics unit at Luftforsvarsbase Bodø, with the Joint Headquarters in the Reitan mountain facility nearby since 2009. Forsvaret is not consistent about the air force chief: its Norwegian pages place the Chief of the Air Force at Bodø, its English organisation page at Rygge.

The biggest new tenant is NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre Bodø. The government announced in May 2025 that a temporary centre costing NOK 438 million would be built at the air station, which the Conservative MP Hårek Elvenes said came like a bolt from the blue because the Storting had not been told. It became operational on 1 October 2025 and was inaugurated on 10 October under its first commander, Major General Tron Strand. Its first live mission, sending two Evenes F-35s to an Il-20 off Finnmark, followed within days.

Whether the centre will move into Reitan as planned is open. Defence minister Tore O. Sandvik said at the opening that savings might be possible if the temporary site could fill the role, prompting criticism from the Conservative MP Tage Pettersen; Forsvarets forum cited an Aftenposten figure of several billion kroner above a maximum estimate of NOK 9.4 billion for the permanent solution. Meanwhile 330 Squadron keeps an AW101 rescue detachment at Bodø, and the Norwegian Aviation Museum, opened in 1994, preserves F-16s and the base’s history next to the runway.