Golubovci sits on the flat Zeta plain between Podgorica and Lake Skadar, and it was flat ground that made it an airfield. The airport operator traces aviation in the capital back to 1928, when a Potez 29-2 landed on the old field at Ćemovsko Polje; the airport at the present site opened in 1961, and on 13 July 1977 the rebuilt Titograd-Golubovci airport opened with a 2,500-metre runway and a parallel taxiway. The civil and military sides have shared that runway ever since.

What the Yugoslav air force did there is less well documented than it should be. English Wikipedia’s order of battle for the late 1980s puts the 127th Fighter-Bomber Aviation Regiment at Golubovci under the 3rd Corps, with two squadrons: the 239th on the G-4 Super Galeb and the 242nd on the J-21 Jastreb and J-22 Orao. Cadets of the air force academy continued their training there, first on the Super Galeb and then on the attack types. The separate Wikipedia article on the base names the 172nd Aviation Brigade and calls Golubovci the main base for primary and basic pilot training. Neither claim is referenced in the articles, and the dates are not published in an official source we could reach, so they are given here as Wikipedia’s account.

The most unusual part of the base was underground. According to English Wikipedia, the military built an aircraft shelter into the hill of Šipčanik, linked to the main runway by a taxiway about six kilometres long whose wider northern section let jets scramble straight out of the shelter. The article gives no construction date and no source for the figures.

What happened next is better documented, because the tunnel now belongs to the state wine company 13. Jul Plantaže. Its own pages describe the cellar as a former military facility that went "from an Ottoman fortification, to a military airfield, to today’s oasis of wine", and say that it has housed wine instead of aircraft since November 2007. The cellar is 356 metres long, covers 7,000 square metres and lies more than 30 metres below ground, at a steady 17–19°C. More than two million litres of wine age there. For a country that no longer flies fixed-wing combat aircraft, it is a characteristically practical end for a Cold War shelter.

During NATO’s 1999 air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav military installations in Montenegro, Golubovci among them, were struck too. Human Rights Watch, which counted three incidents and eight civilian deaths in Montenegro in the whole campaign, lists an attack on the airfield south of Podgorica on 28 April 1999, between 12:30 and 3 p.m.: cluster bomblets landed in the villages of Gosići and Mataguži just east of the field, one person was killed and three were wounded.

English Wikipedia says the aircraft of the Flying Stars (Leteće zvezde) aerobatic team, G-4 Super Galebs, were destroyed on the base during the strikes; its article on the team puts the number at seven. That figure comes from a hobby source and has not been corroborated from Yugoslav, Serbian or NATO records, so it is given as Wikipedia’s.

When Montenegro became independent of the state union with Serbia in June 2006, the aircraft at Golubovci became a practical problem. The new country’s armed forces were small and had no need for jet trainers. Wikipedia says about eleven G-4 Super Galebs were still at the base in 2008. The Serbian Ministry of Defence announced on 23 October 2010 that two more Galebs had landed at Batajnica, taken over at Podgorica airport, as part of a deal for six: Serbia got the aircraft, spare parts and equipment, and Montenegro got shares in the Novi Prvoborac company in Herceg Novi, documents held in Belgrade and a night start device needed by its own air base.

The Serbian ministry put it bluntly: the six aircraft had stayed in Montenegro after the dissolution "since the local armed forces have no need for their use." The rest of the G-4s, according to Wikipedia, were put into storage in 2012 along with the UTVA 75 trainers; their eventual disposal is not confirmed by an official source we could reach.

Since 2018 Golubovci has been rebuilt around helicopters. The government signed a contract for three Bell 412 EP/EPI on 30 January 2018, worth about EUR 30 million; the last two arrived on 10 September 2018 at a ceremony on the military part of the airport, flown from Prague by the Air Force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nenad Pavlović, and Major Darko Pavlović. Two Bell 505 trainers followed in September 2020 and March 2021, according to Wikipedia citing Janes. In the fire season the Bell 412s carry buckets of up to 1,500 litres.

Montenegro joined NATO on 5 June 2017 as its 29th member. It has no fighters, so NATO says Greece and Italy have covered its airspace since 2017. In June 2026 Aviation Week reported that Montenegro would receive four Airbus H145M from a German Army tranche, Germany’s first government-to-government defence sale; where they will be based has not been announced.