Pleso lies south-east of central Zagreb, at Velika Gorica in Zagreb County. It became the city’s airport in 1962, when commercial flying moved there from Lučko with a 2,500-metre runway and a small terminal, according to English Wikipedia. The runway was stretched to its present 3,252 metres in 1974, long enough for any airliner or fighter, and it is still the only one: the 91st Wing’s Rafales and drones taxi out to the same strip as the airliners.

The civil airport has grown around the base. English Wikipedia counts 4,721,563 passengers and 51,664 aircraft movements in 2025, and a 70,000-square-metre terminal was built between 2012 and 2017 under a 30-year concession. The military sits on the other side of the field at the Pukovnik Marko Živković barracks, where the ministry held the 91st Wing’s 33rd anniversary on 19 December 2024. On 27 February 2020 the runway’s designator changed from 05/23 to 04/22, not because anything was built but because magnetic north had moved.

Shared runways are not unusual in Europe, but they shape a fighter base. Noise, slots and the airport’s schedule are daily facts of life, and the air force uses the old terminal for its public air show, AIRVG. Coordinates in English Wikipedia put the field at 45.743 N, 16.069 E and 108 metres above sea level; the Croatian AIP, which would be the authoritative source, is available only to registered users and was not consulted.

Pleso was a Yugoslav field when Croatia declared independence, and it saw one of the strangest episodes of 1991. On 31 August a Uganda Airlines Boeing 707, registration 5X-UCM, chartered by the Croatian emigrant businessman Anton Kikaš and carrying about 18 tonnes of arms, was forced by Yugoslav MiGs to land at Zagreb, according to English Wikipedia’s articles on Kikaš and the airport. Croatian forces attacked the control tower and blocked the roads, but the Yugoslav People’s Army seized the aircraft and flew it out.

Kikaš was arrested at the airport and held in Belgrade for about three months before being exchanged on 25 November 1991 for a Yugoslav officer, Milan Aksentijević. The 707 stayed in Serb service and, the same article says, was used to evacuate people from Sarajevo in 1992. These accounts rest on contemporary agency reports cited by Wikipedia, which were not read for this page.

By the end of the year the new Croatian air force was taking shape around Pleso. The defence ministry dates a temporary fighter squadron to 6 November 1991 and the founding of the air force and air defence to 12 December 1991. Its first combat flying had been done not with jets but with crop dusters: the Osijek independent air platoon, whose members included Marko Živković, flew 29 combat flights and dropped 68 bombs totalling more than 10 tonnes, according to the ministry. English Wikipedia records that Živković was killed with his crew on 2 December 1991. The barracks at Pleso now carries his name.

On 17 January 1992 the MiG pilots and aircraft technicians who had come over to Croatia were paraded at Pleso as the 1st Fighter Squadron. Its first jets were flown in by defectors from the Yugoslav air force: Rudolf Perešin, who took his MiG-21 to Klagenfurt in October 1991, then Danijel Borović, Ivica Ivandić and Ivan Selak in 1992. Selak’s aircraft now stands at the gate of the Pleso barracks. Most of the fleet was bought abroad: English Wikipedia lists 23 MiG-21bis, one MiG-21US and three MiG-21UMs from former Soviet training units in Kyrgyzstan in 1993–1994.

By 1995 the squadron was the 21st Fighter Squadron of the 91st Air Base, Pleso. It flew in Operations Flash and Storm, and its commander was killed in the first of them. On 2 May 1995 Perešin was hit by anti-aircraft fire near Stara Gradiška; the ministry says he ejected over enemy-held ground and died there, and his remains were recovered on 4 August 1997. He is the best-known of the three MiG-21s Wikipedia says were lost to enemy fire in the war.

After the war the MiG-21 had to last far longer than planned. Eight MiG-21bis and four two-seaters were upgraded by Aerostar in Romania in 2003, when Wikipedia records the jets with ‘91 ZB/21 ELZ (Zagreb-Pleso)’. The squadron took the number 191 in late 2019, when the air force reorganised into wings, keeping, the ministry said, its history, identity and missions.

The last big MiG-21 programme became a scandal. On 9 July 2013 the ministry signed with the Ukrainian state exporter Ukrspecexport for the overhaul of seven Croatian MiG-21s and the purchase of five more, all through the repair plant at Odesa; the twelfth was handed over in July 2015, with the ministry announcing penalties for late deliveries. On 22 March 2016 it said that military intelligence and the military police were examining the programme and that an expert commission would assess the aircraft after what it called frequent difficulties, citing, in translation, serious indications of worrying actions. The findings are not published on the pages read here.

Pleso’s fighters had two serious accidents in the last decade of the MiG. On 5 August 2014 MiG-21 no. 121, returning from a sortie to Zadar, suffered a hydraulic failure and an engine fire on final approach; Colonel Stanko Hrženjak waited until the houses below him had passed before ejecting. On 6 December 2022 a two-seater, no. 164, overhauled in 2013–2014, went down near Slatina in Virovitica-Podravina County during a five-aircraft exercise; both crew ejected and survived.

The two pilots of 2022 were Colonel Zvonimir Milatović, who had commanded the 191st Squadron, and Major Ivan Lukan, who was injured. A year later the minister received them; no cause of the crash has been published on the ministry’s site. The accidents added to the pressure for a replacement: the ministry had already written that the whole MiG-21 fleet’s service life would run out in 2024.

The replacement took five years to settle. The government decided to buy a fighter on 4 July 2019, after an earlier deal for Israeli F-16s had collapsed, and on 25 November 2021 signed for 12 used French Rafale F3-Rs, ten single-seat and two two-seat, for EUR 999,068,493, or EUR 1,152,496,307 with VAT and price indexation. New hangars and support buildings went up at the Pleso barracks; in December 2023 the prime minister toured the site and the minister promised it would be ready on time.

The first six Rafales flew from Bordeaux on 25 April 2024 in 1 hour 40 minutes, entering Croatian airspace near Pula and landing at Pleso before the president, the prime minister and the speaker. About 60 Croatian aviators had been trained in France. Two weeks later, at the AIRVG show on 11 May 2024, a Rafale and MiG-21s flew together for the first time. The twelfth Rafale arrived on 25 April 2025.

The handover of the alert was careful. The MiG-21s stood their last air-policing duty on 30 November 2024; Italian Eurofighters and Hungarian Gripens then covered Croatia from their home bases, at no cost to Croatia, so that Rafale training was not interrupted. From 1 January 2026 the Rafales have held the alert 24 hours a day within NATO’s integrated air defence. In March 2025 the squadron flew with US F-16s from Aviano, and in 2026 the government approved EUR 112.2 million to take the jets to the F4 standard by 2032.

The base took on a new kind of aircraft in 2025. Six Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, bought with ground stations and a simulator for EUR 67.01 million excluding VAT, were presented at Pleso on 2 September 2025 with the 125th Squadron under Colonel Andrej Tijan, after crews trained in Türkiye from April to August. On 14 May 2026, on the Eugen Kvaternik range near Slunj, a TB2 made the service’s first live drop of a laser-guided MAM-L bomb, while Rafales practised attacks under Croatian ground controllers.

The case for drones and for a credible alert had been made painfully clear in 2022. On the night of 10 March a Soviet-era Tu-141 reconnaissance drone entered Croatian airspace from Hungary at 22:57 and crashed in the Jarun district of Zagreb at 23:04, at about 700 km/h and 1,300 metres, the ministry said. It had crossed Romania and Hungary for about 43 minutes without being intercepted, according to English Wikipedia, which cites later reports that an aerial bomb was found in the wreckage. No one was hurt.

The incident did not involve Pleso directly, but it shaped the debate the Rafale answered: whether a small NATO member could see and stop a threat over its own capital. Today the 91st Wing holds the Rafales, the TB2s and, across the city at Lučko, the Black Hawk helicopters of the 194th Squadron, making Pleso the centre of Croatian air power.