The airfield the air force calls Borcea lies on the plain of the Bărăgan, across the Borcea branch of the Danube from the town of Fetești, and older pilots still know it as Cocargeaua. According to the English Wikipedia article on the base, which cites the Romanian daily Adevărul and the historian Petre Opriș, it was laid out in 1939 on the orders of the General Staff as a reserve landing ground for the Royal Romanian Air Force.

It saw fighters in earnest in 1944, when the American bombing campaign against the Ploiești oilfields brought the war to Romanian skies. The same article says the 51st Fighter Squadron arrived in February 1944 with Bf 109E and IAR 80 fighters and flew interceptions against USAAF bombers from April, and that the 52nd Squadron followed after 23 August 1944, when Romania changed sides. These details come from secondary sources and have not been checked against Romanian archives.

After the war the airfield passed to the Soviet Air Forces, which, according to Wikipedia, used it until 1958, the year the Red Army left Romania. The Romanian Air Force’s own history is less precise and simply places the arrival of Romanian jets at Cocargeaua at the end of the 1950s. That short Soviet chapter is why the Romanian history of the base really begins with a regiment formed elsewhere.

The Romanian Air Force traces the base’s unit to the 206th Tactical Fighter Aviation Regiment, formed in the spring of 1952 at Deveselu with a command, a staff, a command flight and three squadrons of Yak-11, Yak-18 and MiG-15 aircraft. It moved to Ianca and then Otopeni, where Romanian pilots first flew the MiG-17PF Fresco with its interception radar. At the end of the 1950s it merged with the 499th Airfield Technical Base, moved to Cocargeaua, received a squadron of MiG-19s and took the name 86th Fighter Aviation Regiment.

Wikipedia gives firmer dates: the 206th arrived with MiG-17PFs and MiG-19s on 9 August 1958, became the 86th Regiment in 1959 and received the MiG-21F-13 in 1967. The air force describes the 1970s and 1980s as the MiG-21 era and says that a posting to Borcea was a mark of standing among Romanian fighter pilots. The two accounts differ by a year or two on the move, and this page gives both rather than choosing between them.

The best-known of them was the writer Doru Davidovici, whose aviation books sold widely in communist Romania; he died in a MiG-21UM crash on approach to the base in April 1989. After 1995 the regiment became the 86th Fighter Aviation Group and then the 86th Air Base, named after Lieutenant Gheorghe Mociorniță. Its current commander, Brigadier General Iulian Pațilea, joined the regiment as a pilot in 1991 and took command in September 2023.

In 1998, according to the air force, the base received the MiG-21 LanceR, the Romanian-Israeli upgrade by Aerostar and Elbit that kept the old Soviet fighter credible into the NATO era; Wikipedia dates the start of LanceR training at the base to 1997. The base’s LanceR unit was the 861st Combat Aviation Squadron, named in a Ministry of Defence statement of July 2018.

The airframes were old. After the fatal crash at Borcea in July 2018 the specialist magazine Aviația Magazin counted 10 LanceR accidents in 18 years since 2000, and noted that the aircraft lost that day had entered service in 1975. While Borcea was rebuilt to NATO standards, the 861st Squadron flew from Mihail Kogălniceanu for nine years, from the spring of 2013 until its return in late May 2022, flying air policing over Dobrogea and the Black Sea.

The worst blow came on 2 March 2022, when a LanceR of the squadron and the IAR 330 Puma sent to search for it both crashed in Constanța County, killing eight airmen. After a further incident on 13 April the ministry suspended all MiG-21 flights on 15 April 2022, citing the number of accidents. The type was retired on 15 May 2023, when three LanceRs each from Borcea and Câmpia Turzii flew a final air policing sortie and landed at Bacău.

Romania signed for 12 second-hand F-16s from Portugal in 2013 under the programme the air force calls Peace Carpathian. The jets were upgraded to the F-16 MLU 5.2R standard and Romania became, in the air force’s words, the 27th country to fly the type. Romanian pilots converted at Monte Real, Portugal’s Air Base 5. In November 2016 Aviația Magazin counted six Romanian F-16 pilots, with the aim of 16 operational pilots for the 12 jets by 2018.

The squadron chosen to fly them revived a famous number. The 53rd Fighter Squadron was the unit of Horia Agarici, who shot down three Soviet bombers over Constanța in one sortie on 23 June 1941 while flying from Mamaia; in 2016 it was reborn at Fetești as the Warhawks. Six F-16s landed on 29 September 2016, with the Chief of the Air Staff, General Laurian Anastasof, in the back seat of the two-seater. Three followed on 15 December 2016 and three on 28 September 2017.

Conversion moved home quickly: in November 2017 a Romanian instructor sent the first Romanian-trained pilot solo on the F-16 at Borcea. A 2019 contract added five more ex-Portuguese aircraft, the last delivered on 25 March 2021, giving the Warhawks 17 F-16AM/BMs. The early years had growing pains. In February 2019 Aviația Magazin rebutted press claims that the jets were being cannibalised, explaining the air force’s controlled-exchange rules for parts.

The European F-16 Training Centre was agreed by the Romanian and Dutch defence ministries and Lockheed Martin in August 2023, with Danish support. Romania provides the base and host support, the Netherlands the aircraft and Lockheed Martin the instructors and maintenance, according to the Romanian Ministry of National Defence. The first five Dutch F-16s landed on 7 November 2023, and the centre was inaugurated on 13 November in the presence of the Romanian and Dutch defence ministers and the US ambassador.

The Dutch ministry said it would make 12 to 18 aircraft available while keeping ownership of them. The first students were seven former Romanian MiG-21 pilots, one of whom made the centre’s first flight on 15 January 2024 in the two-seater J-210. Ukrainian pilots followed: the ministry said four were training at Fetești in the autumn of 2024, having started in September. The War Zone dates the first Ukrainian contract to 18 October 2024.

On 3 November 2025 Romania bought the 18 Dutch F-16s for a symbolic one euro, which the defence minister, Ionuț Moșteanu, called an important step for a regional hub. In February 2026 The War Zone reported 18 jets (11 single-seat and seven two-seat), 12 contract instructor pilots from GFD, Draken and others, and 25 students across six courses. Most pilots of the 71st Air Base’s 48th Squadron converted to the F-16 here.

Borcea is the fighter base nearest to Romania’s border with Ukraine on the Danube, and its F-16s have become the main answer to drones that stray over from Russian strikes on Ukrainian river ports. On 13 September 2025 two F-16s from Fetești tracked a drone over northern Tulcea County but did not fire, because, the ministry said, it did not fly over inhabited areas and posed no imminent danger.

On 24 July 2026 the rules had been tested and changed. A drone entered Romanian airspace about 20 km east of Sulina at 09:39 and flew towards Brăila, Fetești and Buzău. Two Italian Eurofighters from Mihail Kogălniceanu took off at 09:48 and two Romanian F-16s from the 86th Air Base at 10:56; at 11:02 one of the F-16s fired a missile and brought the drone down near Padina.

The base also hosts allies. According to Wikipedia and Aviația Magazin, US F-15Es came for Castle Forge in 2021, the 480th and then the 510th Expeditionary Fighter Squadrons flew air policing with F-16s in 2022, three French Rafales arrived on 16 October 2023, Turkish F-16s followed and in March 2026 the RAF’s No. 3 (Fighter) Squadron brought its Typhoons for four months. NATO investment funded much of the modernisation: in 2012 Romania’s foreign minister announced an initial 10 million euro for Fetești and Otopeni.