The United States laid out Nichols Field in 1919, during the insular government, as an air station on the southern edge of Manila. By late 1941 it had become one of the busiest fields in the American build-up: the Official Gazette’s history of the PAF records that $2,730,000 was allocated to develop it in August 1941 and $7,000,000 more in October. Wikipedia names the 20th Air Base Group and a troop of the 26th Cavalry among its garrison; the US Army’s official history places the 17th Pursuit Squadron, flying P-40s, at Nichols on 8 December.

That history, Louis Morton’s The Fall of the Philippines, describes what followed. Japanese naval bombers struck Nichols before dawn on 9 December, and “the loss of 2 or 3 P-40’s, as well as other planes, and the destruction of ground installations completed the havoc” that the Clark raid had begun the day before. On 10 December high-level bombers hit Nichols, Nielson and Del Carmen together, and fighters followed at low level to strafe the aircraft on the ground, with no anti-aircraft fire and no fighter cover over the field. Nichols was struck again on 12 and 13 December.

The Philippine Army Air Corps’ own fighters, the P-26s of the 6th Pursuit Squadron, were not at Nichols but at Batangas. Within a week the American fighter force was reduced, in Morton’s count, to 22 P-40s in commission and a handful of P-35s and obsolete P-26s. Nichols fell to the Japanese with Manila and was not back in American hands until 1945.

Jesús Antonio Villamor was born on 7 November 1914 and was a captain commanding the Philippine Army Air Corps’ 6th Pursuit Squadron when the war began. The Official Gazette’s PAF history gives the squadron twelve Boeing P-26s at Batangas Field. On 10 December 1941 he led them up against a Japanese raid over Manila, and the squadron claimed four aircraft, two of them credited to Villamor.

Two days later he led five P-26s against a formation that Wikipedia gives as 27 bombers and 17 fighters over Batangas. Lieutenant César Basa, his wingman, was shot down and killed; the air base at Floridablanca now carries Basa’s name. General Douglas MacArthur presented Villamor with the Distinguished Service Cross and an oak leaf cluster on 15 December 1941, making him the only Filipino to receive the American award twice. The Filipino claims were never matched against Japanese records and should be read as claims.

Villamor’s war did not end with the air battles. In December 1942 he sailed from Australia in the submarine USS Gudgeon and landed on Negros on 27 January 1943 to set up the “Planet Party” intelligence network linking guerrilla forces in the islands to MacArthur’s headquarters. President Ramón Magsaysay awarded him the Medal of Valor on 21 January 1954. He died in Washington on 28 October 1971. Wikipedia says Nichols was renamed in his honour but gives no date or decree, and none was found for this dataset.

On 1 December 1989 rebel officers of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) launched a coup attempt against President Corazon Aquino. Among their first objectives were the air bases: Villamor, Sangley Point across Manila Bay, and Mactan in Cebu, along with Fort Bonifacio and parts of Camp Aguinaldo, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the event.

The rebels’ T-28 Trojans flew from Sangley Point to dive-bomb Malacañang Palace and Camp Crame. Loyal F-5As took off from Basa to strafe Sangley, according to GlobalSecurity, and Major Danilo Atienza, a loyalist pilot, was killed in the operation; Sangley now carries his name. The decisive pressure came from outside the Philippine forces: President George H. W. Bush authorised US F-4 Phantoms from Clark to fly over the rebel bases with orders to deter any rebel aircraft from taking off.

Government forces recaptured Fort Bonifacio by 3 December, and the last rebels at Mactan surrendered on 9 December. Wikipedia gives a total of 99 dead, including 50 civilians, and 570 wounded across the uprising. For Villamor the lesson was one the air force has not forgotten: an air base in the capital is a political prize as much as a military one.

Villamor today is a headquarters and a terminal, not a flying base in the fighter sense. Its operational unit is the 250th Presidential Airlift Wing, nicknamed the Bluebirds, whose 58th founding anniversary President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. attended in the base gymnasium on 2 September 2026. The wing’s mission, as Inquirer reported it, is safe, secure, efficient and dignified air transport for the President, the First Family and visiting heads of state, and emergency and humanitarian flying in disasters; that morning Marcos had flown by presidential helicopter over flood-hit Zambales and Pampanga.

The base has been shrinking for decades. Wikipedia records that its land was cut back in 1997 for Terminal 3 of Ninoy Aquino International Airport and for the Newport City development, and it has always shared the airport’s runways. That makes it a showcase rather than a war base, and the air force uses it as one: the PAF’s 78th anniversary was held here on 1 July 2025, when the air force reported 95 maritime patrol flights over the West Philippine Sea and other waters and 12,890 missions in support of internal security operations in the year.

On 26 August 2026 the hangar of the presidential wing was the stage for the end of the air force’s largest helicopter programme: the handover of the last seven of 32 S-70i Black Hawks built by PZL Mielec in Poland, bringing the fleet to 47. Lt. Gen. Arthur Cordura, the commanding general, recalled the critical shortfall in combat utility helicopters that the purchase was meant to close; the chief of air staff, Maj. Gen. Alvin Hate, said the numbers now allowed an element to be deployed in each region.