Construction began in 1935, and on 27 September 1937 the Dutch colonial government opened Kadieng airfield; the first commercial flight, a KNILM Douglas DC-2 bound for Singapore, marked the occasion. The runway was a grass strip 1,600 by 45 metres. Japanese forces took Makassar on 8–9 February 1942, and the airfield was captured and wrecked.

The Japanese rebuilt it as Mandai airfield with a concrete runway, using Allied prisoners of war for the work. Allied bombing damaged it heavily in 1945; after the surrender Australian and Indian engineers repaired it and lengthened the runway to 1,745 metres with about 4,000 workers, among them former Japanese soldiers. On 2 June 1950 the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Air Force handed it to the Indonesian Air Force, and in 1955 the civil aviation service took over management of the airport while the air force kept its base.

The 1950s were violent in Sulawesi. The Permesta movement, based in the north of the island, had its own air arm, and on 13 April 1958 its A-26 Invaders bombed the airfield. The Wikipedia account, drawing on local Indonesian sources, also records an attempt on President Sukarno at the airfield in 1962, when mortar rounds were fired at him and missed.

Through the following decades the field grew into a major civil airport: the runway was extended to 2,345 metres in 1955 and 2,400 metres in 1980, when it was renamed after the 17th-century Sultan Hasanuddin of Gowa. A new terminal and a 3,100-metre runway opened in 2008, inaugurated by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on 26 September. The air force base occupies its own side of the airfield and, by Wikipedia’s count, hosts four squadrons.

The 11th Air Squadron is one of the oldest in the air force. Formed at Andir, Bandung, on 1 June 1957, it flew Vampires, MiG-15s and MiG-17s through Trikora and Konfrontasi, was disbanded on 4 March 1974 and re-formed on 5 October 1980. It formally adopted the A-4 Skyhawk on 11 February 1983 and moved to Sultan Hasanuddin in January 1989, according to its Indonesian Wikipedia history; the Skyhawks it flew here had come partly from Israel in a secret deal and partly from US stocks. The last Indonesian A-4 flight was on 5 August 2004.

By then their successors had arrived. During the US arms embargo that followed East Timor in 1999, Indonesia turned to Russia, and from 2003 the squadron received Su-27SK and Su-30MK fighters, followed by Su-27SKMs and Su-30MK2s. The 11th has been Indonesia’s only Sukhoi unit ever since. Its pilots still train on Java too: in late 2025 the squadron’s Sukhois flew in the Defensive Surface Attack Training exercise at Iswahjudi.

Makassar’s central position gives the Sukhois reach over the eastern half of the archipelago, and the squadron has used it. In August 2026 the Air Force Chief of Staff, Tonny Harjono, told ANTARA how, as commander of the 11th Squadron about fifteen years earlier, he led two Sukhois to intercept an aircraft flying from Dili to Kuala Lumpur with Pakistani peacekeepers aboard and forced it to land at Sultan Hasanuddin. The pilot, a retired Pakistani air force officer, had a flight order but no clearance to enter Indonesian airspace. Harjono said the case exposed gaps in the law, which led to work on airspace management legislation.

The fleet is ageing, and the margins are thin. On 24 August 2026 an Su-30MK2 on a simulated take-off after a major overhaul overran the western end of the runway by about 30 metres when its brakes failed to work properly; the crew were unhurt and civil traffic was not disrupted, the air force said.