The Romanian Air Force traces the base’s unit to the 14th Fighter Regiment, set up at Pipera near Bucharest on 1 April 1951 with three Po-2 and five Yak-11 aircraft; Wikipedia gives 15 April. On 26 May 1951 it moved to Ianca and took on two Yak-17s and seven Yak-23s, the first jets, and in December 1951 it was renumbered the 172nd Fighter Regiment. In June 1955 the 172nd moved to Mihail Kogălniceanu, 26 km north-west of Constanța, and it has been a fighter base ever since.

On 1 November 1959 the unit became the 57th Fighter Regiment, the number the base still carries. Between 1960 and 1962 it took MiG-17s and its first supersonic fighters, the MiG-21F-13; the air force lists 12 single-seat and one two-seat MiG-21F-13, 11 MiG-17s, 35 MiG-15s and six MiG-15UTIs. By 1972 the regiment flew only MiG-21s. On 1 June 1981 it merged with the 132nd Technical Aerodrome Base, bringing flying and ground support under one command.

The first MiG-23MF interceptors arrived in 1979, and by 1983 the regiment had 23 MiG-23MF and 32 MiG-21M, according to the air force. In July 1995 the regimental system gave way to air bases and the unit became the 57th Fighter and Fighter-Bomber Air Base. The runway was never the air force’s alone: according to Wikipedia, civil flights for Constanța began here in May 1960, replacing the old Palas airfield, and the airport handled its record 778,766 passengers in 1979. The shared runway is today 3,500 m long.

The MiG-29 was the last Soviet fighter Romania bought. The air force dates the first arrivals at the base to 1989–1990; Wikipedia, citing Paul Sandachi’s history of Romanian jet aviation, says they entered service in December 1989, in the month the Ceaușescu regime fell, with the 2nd and 3rd Squadrons. Wikipedia describes the base in July 1995 as having two MiG-29 squadrons and one MiG-23 squadron. Neither detail has been checked against an official Romanian text.

The 1990s brought shortage rather than growth. In 1998 an anti-aircraft artillery unit was added, and in 2001 the air force folded the 59th Helicopter Regiment into the base; Wikipedia dates that merger to 2002. On 4 August 2003 the base received 13 MiG-21 LanceRs, 12 single-seaters and one two-seater, the Israeli-Romanian upgrade that became the mainstay of the air force after the MiG-29 and MiG-23 were retired.

On 30 April 2004, weeks after Romania joined NATO, the 57th Air Base was disbanded. Only the 863rd Helicopter Squadron, with IAR-330H and IAR-316B helicopters, stayed as a flying unit; the airfield came under the 86th Air Base at Fetești. An administrative centre for the aerodrome followed on 1 June 2007. The base was re-established as the 57th Air Base under the Air Force Staff on 1 July 2018. Its Romanian flying unit today is the 572nd Helicopter Squadron with IAR 330 Pumas.

US Army Garrison Black Sea says American forces have used the base since 1999, and that in 2003 it was one of four Romanian facilities supporting operations in the global war on terror. Human Rights Watch wrote in November 2005 that, by its research, the United States had used the airfield for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 and that the base had been closed to the public and journalists since early 2004. The Romanian Air Force lists transit of US material to and from Afghanistan among the base’s tasks.

The US presence hardened into permanent infrastructure. By 2009 the United States had invested $48 million and set up a Permanent Forward Operating Site. In 2016 Army Support Activity Black Sea took over base support, first under the garrison at Ansbach, then Rheinland-Pfalz and, from May 2024, Poland. On 15 June 2024 it became US Army Garrison Black Sea, which the Army calls its 81st garrison and ninth in Europe, running five sites in Romania and Bulgaria.

These are allied units, not Romanian ones. The garrison lists V Corps, the 21st Theater Sustainment Command, the 1st Armored Division and the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division among its tenants. Numbers have fallen: on 29 October 2025 Romania’s defence ministry said a US brigade based at the base would stop rotating to Europe and that about one thousand American troops would remain in the country.

NATO’s enhanced air policing in the south began after Russia seized Crimea in 2014. The Royal Air Force was the first to base fighters at the base for it: four Typhoons of 3 (Fighter) Squadron arrived in May 2017 for up to four months, under what the UK called Operation Biloxi. In August 2018 RAF Typhoons of 1 (Fighter) Squadron launched from the base twice in a week, the second time against a Russian Be-12 heading south-west from Crimea.

Canada has flown CF-18s from the base too. Its August 2022 deployment of eight CF-18s and about 170 people, mostly from 425 Squadron at Bagotville, was Canada’s seventh air task force in Romania since 2014, according to the Canadian Department of National Defence. The RAF was back in March 2022 and again from 9 April 2024, when six Typhoons of IX (Bomber) Squadron began a four-month rotation.

Italy had Eurofighters at the base from December 2021, doubling the detachment to eight in the days after Russia invaded Ukraine, with German and US aircraft alongside. On 3 June 2024 seven Finnish F/A-18 Hornets and about 80 personnel landed for two months; in October 2025 five Typhoons of Germany’s Tactical Air Wing 71 “Richthofen” were on duty; and in 2026 Spanish F-18s held the alert, alongside Italian Eurofighters in July.

A week into the war in Ukraine, Romanian fighters were flying air patrols over Dobruja. At about 19:50 on 2 March 2022 a pair of MiG-21 LanceRs took off from the base. At 20:00 one lost radio contact and at 20:03 it vanished from radar between Cogealac and Gura Dobrogei. The pilot, Captain Costinel Iosif Niță, 31, of the 861st Fighter Squadron of the 86th Air Base, was killed; he had flown some 420 of his 570 hours on the LanceR.

An IAR 330 Puma of the 57th Air Base took off at about 20:21 to search for him. Its pilot reported bad weather and was ordered back; at about 20:44 the helicopter disappeared from radar near Gura Dobrogei, about 11 km from the airfield. All seven aboard were killed: five aircrew, Lieutenant Commander Florin Bogdan, Lieutenant Sorin Pătrașcu, Master Sergeant Gelu Banu, Corporal Cătălin Lațeș and Sergeant Ionuț Marinescu, and two navy rescue divers, Master Sergeants Vlad Carp and Sergiu Bosoi.

Both fleets were grounded, and a NATO air-policing demonstration planned at the base for the next day was cancelled. On 23 March 2022 the ministry published the investigators’ preliminary conclusions: both crashes most likely resulted from a combination of human and environmental factors, with their relative weight to be settled when the investigation ended. The military prosecutor’s office in Constanța coordinated the inquiry. Flights with both types resumed after procedural reviews and technical checks.

On 11 June 2024 Defence Minister Angel Tîlvăr marked the start of work on a new runway at the base, which the ministry called the first runway it had built in 30 years. The whole modernisation and expansion project is valued at about 12.173 billion lei before VAT; the ministry estimates completion about 240 months after its approval in 2021, and says the base will then cover about 2,800 hectares.

The chief of the air force, Major General Leonard-Gabriel Baraboi, said the project would give Romania its first complete, complex airfield infrastructure built since 1990. The minister tied it to defence spending of 2% of GDP from 2017, raised to 2.5% in 2024, and to jobs in Constanța County. The existing runway, shared with the civil airport, is 3,500 m long and 45 m wide, according to the airport operator.

Wikipedia, citing Romanian press, describes a roughly two-billion-euro plan for a Ramstein-sized base for up to 10,000 NATO personnel and families; those figures have not been confirmed in an official text. What is official is the direction of travel: allied fighters on alert, a US Army garrison, and a minister who said the investment would improve the operating and training capacity of both the Romanian Air Force and the allied forces that can be hosted there.