On 10 August 1912 President Roque Sáenz Peña signed the decree creating the Escuela de Aviación Militar at El Palomar, west of Buenos Aires, and the Argentine Air Force still counts its birthday from that date. The army’s flying school was the seed of everything that followed; independence as a separate service came only on 4 January 1945.

The early airfield is tied to the name of Jorge Newbery, Argentina’s aviation pioneer. The Air Force’s history records that in 1912 he flew across the Río de la Plata and back to El Palomar in a single day, and that in 1914 he set an altitude record of 6,225 metres over the field. On 1 March 1914 he was killed in a flying display at Mendoza while preparing to cross the Andes.

El Palomar is the home of the I Air Brigade, the Air Force’s transport wing, whose C-130H Hercules, built between 1968 and 1979 according to Zona Militar, have carried most of its heavy airlift for half a century. On 2 April 1982, the day Argentina landed on the islands Britain calls the Falkland Islands and Argentina the Islas Malvinas, Operation ARIES 82 sent four Hercules (TC-68, TC-63, TC-64 and TC-65, call signs LITRO 1 to 4) and four Fokker F28s to the airfield at Stanley; the first Hercules carried more than a hundred men, Zona Militar records.

The Hercules kept flying to the islands through the British blockade. English Wikipedia, drawing on British sources, says the Stanley runway was used by C-130s until the end of the war, though only 70 tonnes of supplies and 340 troops came in after 1 May. On 1 June 1982 TC-63, on a reconnaissance sortie north of San Carlos after a supply run, was shot down by a Sea Harrier FRS.1 of 801 Naval Air Squadron flown by Lieutenant Commander Nigel Ward; all seven crew were killed. Zona Militar times the take-off at 08:53 and the interception at about 10:25, with the second of two Sidewinders striking the right wing before cannon fire finished the aircraft. Zona Militar names the crew as Vice-Commodore Hugo Meisner, Captains Rubén Martel and Carlos Krause, and four non-commissioned officers.

The Hercules fleet is the brigade’s strength and its worry. Zona Militar reported in February 2026, after an engine problem on TC-66 on 17 February, that the first Hercules, TC-61 of 1968 (the aircraft that opened Marambio in 1970), was out of service, the L-100 was inactive, and the force depended on a few airframes and on maintenance contracts signed in December 2025.

The workload has not shrunk. In 2026, according to Zona Militar, a C-130H flew humanitarian aid to Bolivia in May, a first humanitarian echelon of 26 personnel and four canine teams left El Palomar for Venezuela in June, and a Hercules from the brigade supported the Antarctic season via Ushuaia. On 18 August 2026 a C-130 and an Embraer ERJ-140 flew relief to Colombia after an earthquake, the Air Force reported.

For two years El Palomar was also a civil airport. English Wikipedia records that in February 2017 the low-cost airline Flybondi announced it would fly from the military field from 2018, and JetSMART also used it on international routes. The experiment ended in 2020, when commercial flights stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic; by 2022 the passenger facilities were reportedly being dismantled, and no scheduled flights operate today.

The base keeps a ceremonial role. The Air Force held its 1 May 2024 commemoration of the 42nd anniversary of its baptism of fire at the I Air Brigade, with Defence Minister Luis Petri, veterans and a flypast of a KC-130H and A-4ARs. The field also had a brief film career: Wikipedia notes it stood in for Santiago airport in the 2015 film Colonia.