Upper Volta’s flying service began small. Tom Cooper’s account for the Air Combat Information Group dates the Escadrille de Haute-Volta to 1964, organised with French assistance, and says that by 1974 it ran two units, both based at Ouagadougou airport, one of them the Escadron de Transport with Nord 262s. It was a transport and liaison flight, and the capital’s airport was all it needed.

Geography made that a weakness when the border dispute with Mali turned into war. Cooper notes that in 1985 the air force had only two airfields at its disposal, Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, and that both were more than 200 km from the most important parts of the shared border. Mali’s MiG-21s, by contrast, could use Gao, Mopti and Ségou.

When fighting began on 25 December 1985, English Wikipedia’s sources say, two Malian MiG-21s bombed Djibo, Ouahigouya and Nassoumbo at about 08:45; later raids hit Djibo, Ouahigouya, Tougan and Dédougou. Burkina tried to answer with its sole MiG-17, and no air-to-air engagement took place. On 26 December it struck Sikasso, killing four Malians and wounding four according to Wikipedia. None of the sources checked describes an attack on Ouagadougou or Bobo-Dioulasso. The ANAD-brokered ceasefire took effect on the morning of 30 December.

Burkina Faso’s jet era is one of the least documented in Africa, and most of what is known comes from photographs taken at Ouagadougou. Cooper and Jan Mikes, writing for ACIG in 2003, say the air force is known to have operated a handful of MiG-17Fs in the early 1990s. One of them was seen in excellent condition during the 1990s and again in 2001, by then in open storage, left to rust, at Ouagadougou.

The same article says the force seems to have acquired a small number of MiG-21bis in the early 1990s, but that the example photographed at Ouagadougou was already out of service by 1993. That claim has not been corroborated elsewhere, and the service page treats it with caution. The better-known MiG-21s, ten Libyan aircraft stationed in Burkina in 1984–1985, were flown and kept by Libya, according to Cooper and Wikipedia.

No retirement date for the MiG-17s has been published, and their present fate is unknown. Since then the base has had no jets of its own: its combat aircraft are turboprop Super Tucanos.

BA 511 is not a separate airfield. The ASECNA aeronautical information publication, valid from 14 May 2026, describes Ouagadougou as an aerodrome open to civil and military traffic, run by the Société des Aéroports du Faso, with a military apron of its own beside the civil terminal. The single runway, 04/22, is 3,014 m long and 45 m wide; French Wikipedia gives 3,028 m and puts the site at 426 hectares in the middle of the city, renovated in 2010–2011.

That central position has made the military side useful to more than one air force. English Wikipedia, citing a 2012 Washington Post report, says the United States military used it as the hub of its airborne intelligence operations for much of West Africa, flying small unarmed turboprops disguised as private aircraft. The original article could not be retrieved for this dataset.

The capital has outgrown the airport. A new international airport at Donsin, about 35 km north of Ouagadougou, was started in September 2021 and, English Wikipedia says, finished as a construction project in spring 2024, though not yet open. It is planned to replace the Thomas Sankara airport. Whether the air force will stay at the old site has not been published.

The jihadist insurgency gave the base a new tempo. Three A-29B Super Tucanos arrived in September 2011 for the Escadrille de Chasse at Ouagadougou, according to Wikipedia, and defenceWeb reports that on 15 March 2019 an Il-76 carried two long-stored Mi-17s from Base Aérienne 511 to Pardubice in the Czech Republic, for an overhaul at LOM Praha that added four years to their service lives.

On 16 November 2021 the C295W XT-MBH was delivered to Escadron de Transport 511 at BA 511. In September 2024 the Minister of State Bassolma Bazié visited the Base Aérienne de Ouagadougou to thank the air force for flying the national civil-service examinations into areas cut off by insecurity, the state news agency AIB reported.

The drones are kept elsewhere. After Captain Ibrahim Traoré handed over twelve TB2 and Akinci drones on 8 April 2024, defenceWeb reported at least two Akinci and three TB2s at a new drone base south of the capital; its location and units are not published here. The first five TB2s had arrived in April and May 2022, Military Africa says, and on 21 June 2023 one crashed near Tenkodogo after a technical failure while returning to an unnamed base, according to the armed forces. French special forces of Operation Sabre, who had been in Burkina Faso as part of Barkhane, were asked on 23 January 2023 to leave within a month. Their camp was at Kamboinsin, not the airport: after the coup of 30 September 2022, Wikipedia records, the new junta accused the ousted leader of trying to reach the French base of Camp Kamboinsin.