The military airfield at Szandaszőlős, south-east of Szolnok town centre on the plain beside the River Tisza, was established in 1940 to train pilots for the Royal Hungarian Air Force. The Ministry of Defence says simply that military aircraft have been stationed there continuously since the early 1940s. Its own unit history adds that during the Second World War the field was used operationally first by German and then by Soviet forces, but gives no unit names or dates for either, and none are offered here.

The town paid heavily for its railway junction and river bridges. English Wikipedia, summarising local histories, says Szolnok was bombed twelve times in 1944, mostly by American aircraft, with serious damage and many deaths; which raids struck the airfield itself is not recorded in the sources checked. Troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front entered the ruined town on 4 November 1944 during the advance on Budapest.

After the war the airfield grew with the new Hungarian People’s Army air force. When it was extended in 1952, archaeologists uncovered more than two hundred Gepid and Sarmatian graves, with gilded brooches, iron weapons and pottery. Four years later Szolnok entered the history books for a different reason: at 06:00 on 4 November 1956, as Soviet troops crushed the revolution, János Kádár proclaimed his new government from the town. The sources checked do not say what part the airfield played in those days.

From 1949 Szolnok became the centre of Hungarian pilot training through the Kilián György aviation officer school, a name that survives in the barracks’ postal address, Kilián György út 1, long after the barracks itself was renamed. The ministry’s unit history lists a renewal of pilot and technical training in 1961, a Flying Training Regiment formed in 1964 and a reconnaissance aviation regiment from 1971; the aircraft types flown by those regiments are not given in the sources checked.

The 1960s were a turning point. English Wikipedia records that domestic fixed-wing pilot training was stopped and the air force’s 18 Aero L-29 Delfín jet trainers were handed to the Soviet Union; for the rest of the Cold War only helicopter pilots and technicians were trained at Szolnok. The aviation museum that grew out of the college’s teaching collection is now RepTár in Szolnok; Wikipedia dates the museum to 1967 but its collection to 1973, and the discrepancy is unresolved.

In 1993 Szolnok ran Hungary’s first home pilot course since 1956, using Yak-52 primary trainers bought from Romania and L-39 jets donated by Germany, but it was halted after one course on cost grounds. Hungary joined NATO Flying Training in Canada in 2002. Today Szolnok is again the first rung: in July 2020 the ministry reported NFTC candidates making their first solo flights here before leaving for Canada, and the base commander said in 2022 that home pilot training had restarted in 2018.

The first four Soviet-built Mi-24Ds reached the Hungarian People’s Army on 26 July 1978. They were first shown in public in the PAJZS-79 exercise in May 1979 and fired live for the first time in 1980. The ministry says the air force’s combat helicopter capability peaked in the 1980s, with 39 Mi-24s in service, concentrated in the 87th unit at Szentkirályszabadja; in the 1990s the gunships also flew along the southern border with the former Yugoslavia.

The Hinds came to Szolnok in 2004, when the Bakony combat helicopter regiment was merged with the 89th Mixed Transport Aviation Regiment, which had flown Mi-8s and An-26s from Szolnok since 1 May 1984, to form the 86th Szolnok Helicopter Regiment. Világgazdaság, drawing on the brigade’s own history, puts the total at 46 Mi-24s of different sub-types over nearly half a century, three of them destroyed in accidents. It also says the type proved itself in NATO tasks in Afghanistan, without detailing them.

The last live firing took place over Hajmáskér on 27 October 2025. The calendar life of the last Mi-24s expired at midnight on 5 February 2026, and on 17 June 2026 the brigade said a formal farewell at Szolnok to both the Mi-24 and the Mi-17, of which Hungary had acquired seven from 1987. One Mi-24 museum example, number 577, is preserved at RepTár, and a previously damaged airframe was blown up for the fifth Die Hard film, shot in Hungary.

The Mi-24s and Mi-17s were replaced under the Zrínyi defence and force development programme. The ministry signed for 20 Airbus H145Ms in June 2018; the first two arrived at Szolnok on 18 November 2019 and the twentieth on 3 December 2021. More than 50 pilots and nearly 100 technicians trained at Donauwörth in Germany. English Wikipedia lists only 19 H145Ms in service and one lost; no official statement explaining the difference was found, so it is left open here.

The larger H225M followed: the first two, numbers 70 and 71, were welcomed with water cannon at Szolnok on 17 July 2023, and HVG reported the last two of 16 arriving in July 2025. Both types can carry the HForce weapons kit with 20 mm cannon and 70 mm rockets, so the armed H145M took over the gunship role. The H145M’s acting battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Zsolt Simon, said Mi-8 crews had to learn to be flight managers rather than stick-and-rudder pilots.

Infrastructure followed the aircraft. The ministry’s simulator centre, created in 2019, was described as unique in the region and has trained Bulgarian special-operations helicopter crews under EDA-accredited instructors. On 23 March 2026 the minister handed over a new complex begun in 2023: a 16-place hangar, a search-and-rescue base, a maintenance plant for eight helicopters at once, a building for a 250-strong aviation technical battalion and a 115,000 square-metre apron.

The new fleet has taken Szolnok crews abroad. In October 2022 two H145Ms flew to Butmir camp in Sarajevo for the EU’s Quick Response exercise, logging 77 hours by day and night; the ministry says it was the first time Hungarian soldiers flew a night medical evacuation in an H145M. In August 2026 two H225Ms reinforced EUFOR Althea’s air component at Butmir, carrying Austrian engineers and Greek bomb-disposal teams to Mostar.

Since March 2025 H145Ms from the brigade have flown reconnaissance for the NATO-led KFOR force in Kosovo, where, by February 2026, two rotations had been completed and a third was preparing to return. Pilots selected for special air operations train with a centre at Zadar in Croatia, and the brigade includes a Special Air Operations Squadron flying both Airbus types. In September 2026 a Szolnok H145M also flew a display at the Jesolo air show in Italy.

At home the helicopters are the state’s heavy-lift tool. H145Ms flew flood reconnaissance over the Sajó and Hernád rivers in October 2020. H225Ms fought fires in Vas County and in North Macedonia in 2024, and on 31 August 2026 two of them made 15 water drops near Diszel and Zalahaláp. The same day two H225Ms placed 117 concrete blocks of 2.5 tonnes each into the Danube riverbed at Paks to halt erosion.

The unit’s names track Hungary’s politics. The barracks, once named after the communist-era figure Kilián György, was renamed in May 2005 after József Kiss, a sergeant pilot from Pozsony who scored 19 confirmed victories for Austria-Hungary and was shot down near Lamon in Italy on 24 May 1918, then promoted to lieutenant after his death. The brigade itself bore Kiss’s name from 1 January 2023 until 1 September 2026, when the defence minister restored the Szolnok title.

Szolnok is also a meeting point for special operations. In February 2023 Hungary’s Joint Special Operations Command hosted a regional conference in the town, attended by Lieutenant General Antonio Fletcher, commander of NATO Special Operations Headquarters, and special-forces chiefs from Austria, Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia. They approved the plan leading to NATO certification of the regional special operations component command, and staff courses for 40 officers from Hungary and the region began at Szolnok in March 2023.

No allied flying unit is based at Szolnok, but its crews train alongside allies. During Neptune Strike 2022, from 10 to 27 October, US Navy F/A-18E/F Super Hornets from the carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Mediterranean dropped practice and live bombs on Hungarian ranges at Bakony and Kőröshegy, while Szolnok personnel worked with Hungarian, German, Italian and American forward air controllers supporting the Hungarian-led NATO battlegroup.