The navy had wanted aircraft since the 1965 war, but, according to English Wikipedia’s history of the air arm, the air force opposed a separate naval aviation branch and the money did not exist. The 1971 war, when the navy had to borrow a Fokker F27 from Pakistan International Airlines to look for Indian ships off Karachi, settled the argument. Westland Sea Kings from the Royal Navy followed in 1974–1975, and they needed a home.

That home was PNS Mehran. Its command post was completed on 25 September 1975 and the station was commissioned the next day, with Captain Fazl Rab as commanding officer. Rather than build a new runway, the navy settled beside the Pakistan Air Force at Drigh Road, today PAF Base Faisal; Wikipedia says Mehran shares jurisdiction with Faisal and Faisal Cantonment, and its list of airports gives the naval air station under Faisal’s code, OPSF. Over the next years Mehran received the Atlantic squadron (No. 29, from August 1976), the Alouette squadron (No. 333, 1977) and the F27s of No. 27 Squadron (1982). In 1990, Wikipedia says, it became the first Pakistani naval aviation base able to operate at night.

No. 29 Squadron’s Breguet Atlantics were the longest-legged aircraft the navy had. On 10 August 1999, a month after the Kargil war, one of them, flying as Atlantic-91 with 16 men aboard, was intercepted near the border in the Rann of Kutch by two Indian MiG-21s and shot down by an R-60 missile. Every man aboard was killed.

What the aircraft was doing remains disputed. India says it had come within 10 km of the border, crossed into Indian airspace near Kori Creek and behaved in a hostile manner. Pakistan says it was an unarmed training flight inside Pakistani airspace and that the wreckage fell on Pakistani soil. Pakistan went to the International Court of Justice on 21 September 1999; on 21 June 2000 the court ruled that it had no jurisdiction, without deciding the facts. The Atlantics flew on from Mehran until they were formally retired in September 2012.

Late on 22 May 2011, three weeks after US forces killed Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad, militants entered PNS Mehran. The Pakistani Taliban claimed the attack as revenge for bin Laden. The fighting lasted about 16 hours by Wikipedia’s count and 17 by Al Jazeera’s. Two P-3C Orions were destroyed on the ground; Wikipedia’s Orion article says that was half of the navy’s P-3C fleet at the time. Eleven Chinese technicians and six American advisers on the station were evacuated unharmed.

The numbers have never been settled. Al Jazeera reported that the government and navy counted six attackers while a police report counted ten to twelve, and that the gap led analysts to suspect inside help; it gave ten dead on the base. Wikipedia gives 18 security personnel killed and 16 wounded, and puts the material loss at about 6.47 billion rupees. Its account adds that naval personnel were later investigated for links to the Taliban. The United States agreed in June 2011 to replace the two Orions, and two more P-3Cs arrived in February 2012.

Mehran’s flight line has changed more in the last decade than in the previous thirty years. The F27 retired on 21 January 2020. ATR 72 airliners converted in Germany by Rheinland Air Service into RAS 72 Sea Eagle patrol aircraft arrived from June 2018, and Wikipedia lists them with No. 29 Squadron. On 2 September 2021 the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi, inducted the first Sea Sultan at Mehran: an Embraer Lineage 1000E business jet converted for long-range maritime patrol, with a range Naval News gave as 8,500 km. Naval News reported a contract for three and an eventual total of ten; how many have arrived since has not been published.

The pattern is deliberate. Quwa, a Pakistani defence analysis site, describes the Sea Sultan as the focus of the effort to replace the ageing P-3C, using commercial airframes with off-the-shelf sensors to keep costs down. What it does not yet answer is whether a navy with a handful of patrol aircraft can keep watch over the Arabian Sea on its own.