France ordered three Boeing E-3F Sentries on 26 February 1987 and a fourth on 17 August 1987, under the 1987–1991 military programming law. The first machine entered French airspace on 10 October 1990 and was received at Avord that December in the presence of the defence minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Aircraft 201 entered service on 22 May 1991; 202 followed on 25 July, 203 on 24 September and 204 on 21 November. The unit was declared operational on 19 June 1992. Four aircraft was the fleet then and four is the fleet now.

Nineteen people fly in an E-3F: two pilots, a navigator, a flight engineer, and fourteen controllers, operators and technicians. The AN/APY-2 primary radar turns six times a minute inside a rotodome 9.10 metres across and 1.80 metres thick at its centre; the ministry publishes its air-mode range as more than 400 kilometres, with Doppler processing to pull low-flying targets out of ground clutter. An AN/UPX-40 interrogator handles identification in Mode S and Mode 5. Endurance is ten hours unrefuelled and up to eighteen with tanker support, at around 10,000 metres and a cruise of 360 knots give or take fifty.

What the aeroplane actually does is make everybody else more useful. It builds the tactical air picture, manages the airspace, passes threat warnings straight into the NATO defence chain and relays between ground control centres and the fighters. It underwrites the posture permanente de sûreté aérienne (the permanent air policing posture) and, less publicly, it contributes directly to nuclear raid planning — which is the reason the air force staff treats a gap in the capability as intolerable rather than merely inconvenient.

The fleet passed 50,000 flight hours in 2013 and then went through a mid-life upgrade between 2014 and 2016 worth roughly 340 million euros, contracted through United States Foreign Military Sales in 2010 and cleared by Washington in September 2012. Air France Industries KLM Engineering & Maintenance did the work at Le Bourget and Roissy under Boeing’s programme direction, bringing the aircraft close to the Block 40/45 standard of the American E-3G: new consoles, new computers and rewritten mission software. A separate cockpit modernisation, the FCU, followed in 2017.

The idea came from the Prince d’Arenberg, who in the autumn of 1908 persuaded parliament that the Cher should have an aeronautical station. The military manoeuvres in Picardy in 1910 settled the argument about whether aeroplanes were of any use, and on 13 September 1910 General Brun approved the choice of the existing infantry camp at Avord as a flying ground. The formal handover to aviation took place on 23 July 1912. Capitaine Georges Bellenger had arrived in May to command it and found a site that needed levelling before anything could take off from it; the first course opened in October 1912 with ten pupils, one of whom was a twenty-year-old from Bizerte named Georges Madon.

The school closed on mobilisation in 1914 and reopened that November, and then grew at a rate that is hard to picture now. By July and August 1916 it counted 203 buildings and 50,000 square metres of hangar; by 1918 the landing ground covered 10,881,500 square metres — about the same 1,100 hectares the base occupies today. Some 3,000 men worked there, including Vietnamese labourers. Avord specialised in advanced and night flying, and French accounts of the period call it the largest flying school in the world. More than 9,000 pilots took their brevet there before the armistice.

The building that best survives from that period is not a hangar in the ordinary sense. In 1916 Eugène Freyssinet, working for the Limousin firm, put up eight thin-shell reinforced-concrete barrel vaults, each spanning 46 metres without an internal support, 60 metres long and 11.50 metres high. They were an engineering statement as much as a shed, and they led directly to the far more famous Freyssinet airship hangars at Orly. Two came through the bombing of 1944; one was demolished later to make room for the AWACS. The survivor now houses the ground-based air defence training centre.

The school dissolved in 1919 and reopened in 1921 for observers and officer pilots. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry passed through in April 1922 during his own training. In 1935 the 15e escadre de bombardement (bomber wing) formed at Avord, flying Farman 221 and 222 four-engined bombers from 1936, and by September 1939 the base had become a bombardment instruction centre with fighter groups deployed in on 8 October 1939.

The war reached Avord before the Germans did. On 11 May 1940 about thirty Heinkel bombers with fighter escort attacked the field, destroying hangars, workshops and the chapel and killing four French soldiers; ten more were wounded. German ground forces occupied the base on 23 June 1940, and for the next four years it was Fliegerhorst Avord.

The Luftwaffe used it for exactly what the French had used it for: training, plus a base from which to reach England. III./KG 27 Boelcke brought its Heinkel He 111s in on 25 June 1940 and left for Brittany on 3 August; IV./KG 27, a training group, stayed from July 1940 to December 1941, flying deception sorties over England while the army was quietly moving east for Barbarossa. The longest resident was IV./KG 4 General Wever, another He 111 training group, from January 1942 to January 1944. Flugzeugführerschule (B) 15 worked Avord from Bourges between 1 March 1943 and 15 May 1944, converting crews onto the He 177. Shorter stays included I./KG 1 Hindenburg resting after the Eastern Front in August 1942, the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condors of III./KG 40 from 15 January to 5 February 1944, and the Junkers Ju 88 and Ju 188 pathfinders of I./KG 66 between March and May 1944 during Operation Steinbock, the last German bombing of London.

The Organisation Todt rebuilt the field in concrete. The grass strip was replaced by two paved runways, 13/21 and 05/23, finished in 1942, together with a control tower, dispersal pens and bomb storage, and a rail connection. That concrete is the reason Avord could later take a Mirage IV and an E-3F while other 1912 airfields could not.

The Allies came for it repeatedly in 1944: 5 February, 28 April, 23 May, 4 June and 25 June. On 19 August 1944 the Germans set charges throughout the buildings, runways and access roads and blew the place up on their way out. Roughly ninety per cent of it was gone. The Cher was liberated in September 1944, and reconstruction ran until October 1945; of the eight great Freyssinet hangars, only two were fit to be repaired.

Avord took on a nuclear vocation in 1964, when it was named one of nine bases of the Forces aériennes stratégiques (strategic air forces). The work that followed was substantial: a 3,500-metre runway, a parallel taxiway, a special-munitions depot and alert zones. The ministry dates the base’s entry into the deterrent to 1966, when Mirage IV crews and a C-135 refuelling squadron first stood nuclear alert here.

The bomber unit was escadron de bombardement 1/94 Bourbonnais, flying the Dassault Mirage IVA from Avord from 1965 until 1 July 1976, when it was renamed escadron de bombardement 1/94 Guyenne. It went on flying the Mirage IVA from Avord until it was dissolved on 1 December 1986. The alert posture of the period is worth understanding: never more than four aircraft on any one base, aircraft ready to go in five or fifteen minutes, and a dispersal plan that used something like fifty French airfields to make the force impossible to destroy on the ground in a single strike.

The tankers mattered as much as the bombers, because a Mirage IV could not reach its targets without one. Escadron de ravitaillement en vol 4/94 Sologne was created at Avord on 15 April 1966 with Boeing C-135F; it became ERV 2/93 Sologne on 1 July 1976 and its traditions were laid up in 1993. When the last French C-135 retired on 30 June 2025, the modern Sologne squadron flew one back to Avord on 3 April 2025 for a memorial visit to the place it was born.

What is still there is less visible. Avord holds one of France’s three ASMP vector depots — the others are Istres and Saint-Dizier — and the base’s official presentation lists among its four missions the storage, maintenance and employment of the ASMP missile in support of nuclear alert. Since 2016 it has also been home to escadron SYDEREC 92.532 Astarté, the joint unit operating the système de dernier recours: the hardened transmission chain that delivers the President’s order to the nuclear forces when every other means has been destroyed or jammed. Created in September 2000 at Brétigny-sur-Orge, it marked twenty-five years on 1 October 2025. The base also runs an ammunition establishment at Savigny-en-Septaine, through which the flow of munitions quadrupled in the year after Russia invaded Ukraine, routed east to Poland and Romania.

Avord has never stopped being a school. The line running from 1912 through the twin-engine transformation school of 23 May 1945 reaches the present as the école de l’aviation de transport 00.319 (transport aviation school). The groupement école 319 was formed at Avord in 1965 when the base’s old instruction group was broken up; it took the title école de l’aviation de transport 00.319 on 1 August 1994 and was named for Capitaine Jean Dartigues on 2 February 2001 — a transport pilot killed on 27 March 1954 when his Dakota was hit by Viet Minh anti-aircraft fire during a low-level drop over Diên Biên Phu.

It has flown the Siebel Si 204 and the NC.701 Martinet, then the Dassault MD 312 Flamant for more than thirty years from 1952, and the Embraer EMB-121 Xingu since 1983. Its flying squadron is the escadron d’instruction en vol Fourchambault, and Belgian students train alongside the French. The Xingu is now the problem: 32 remain across the two services, 22 with the air force and ten with the Marine nationale, and a twin with round dials is a poor introduction to an A400M or a C-130J.

The replacement programme, the avion de transport école du futur, has been slow. The DGA put out a request for information in June 2023 and a full call for tenders on 15 June 2025, with applications closing on 19 August 2025. Rather than name a number of aeroplanes, the DGA asked bidders for flight hours: 10,100 a year for the air force and 3,400 for the navy, to be flown from Avord with an option for Lann-Bihoué. The Royal Air Force’s choice of the Embraer Phenom 100 is widely expected to shape the French answer.

The second school is newer and less known. The escadre sol-air de défense aérienne — 1er régiment d’artillerie de l’air (ground-based air defence wing) has been at Avord since 2014, bringing with it escadron de défense sol-air 02.950 Sancerre, the technical support squadron 2E.950, and the centre de formation et d’expertise de la défense sol-air 14.950, which trains France’s surface-to-air operators — in the surviving 1916 Freyssinet hangar. The Sancerre squadron works the Crotale and the SAMP/T Mamba, and its operators have deployed the Mamba to Cap Midia in Romania. It is the reason the base describes air defence, not just airborne detection, as one of its four core jobs.

The loi de programmation militaire 2024–2030 as first written made no provision for a successor to the E-3F, hinting instead at leaning on NATO’s Alliance Future Surveillance and Control study. In November 2024 the deputy François Cormier-Bouligeon, reporting on the equipment credits of programme 146, said plainly that stretching the aircraft to 2035 was unwise operationally and financially, and that a successor had to be chosen in 2025. He pointed at Saab’s GlobalEye and noted that early French trials of the system had gone well.

The air force chief of staff, General Jérôme Bellanger, made the same case to the Assemblée nationale defence commission on 9 July 2025 in blunter terms. He said he would have liked a Dassault Falcon 10X to carry the mission and had raised it with Dassault’s chairman, but the first E-3F would leave service by 2030 at the latest, the aeroplane contributes directly to nuclear raids, and therefore it had to be bought off the shelf. The only offer at a reasonable price, he said, was GlobalEye; the American E-7 was not in that category. The delegate general for armament, Emmanuel Chiva, put a number on the other half of the argument: the E-3F costs about 100,000 euros an hour to fly, and that figure was only going to rise.

The decision came at the end of the year. On 30 December 2025 France contracted Saab for two GlobalEye systems — the Erieye ER radar and Leonardo’s Seaspray maritime radar on a Bombardier Global 6000/6500 airframe — for just over 1.1 billion euros, with an option on two more. Deliveries are expected between 2029 and 2032. A month earlier, on 30 November 2025, the maintenance directorate had signed Air France Industries KLM E&M for another ten years of support on the four E-3F, which is how you hold a 1991 aeroplane together while its replacement is built.

The 2026 budget documents also record that the planned refit of the E-3F was cut back sharply: the mission-system obsolescence work and the integration of sovereign satellite communications were dropped. France has decided to spend nothing more than it must on the Sentry. Avord will keep four E-3F, then take a smaller, newer, cheaper aircraft with a fixed radar instead of a rotodome — and go on doing what it has done since 1992.