Karachi was the gateway to British India for aircraft flying from Britain and the Middle East, and RAF Drigh Road, on the other side of the city, was its big maintenance depot. In 1942, according to Wikipedia, the Royal Indian Air Force built Mauripur as a transit airfield so that Drigh Road could get on with maintenance. Huge numbers of aircraft staged through it during and after the war. Wikipedia’s list of names gives RIAF Base Mauripur from 1940, so the exact opening year is uncertain; 1942 is the date the article’s narrative uses.

The RAF units recorded here were mostly transport squadrons flying Dakotas (Nos. 10, 31, 62, 77, 117 and 267), with Halifax A.7s of No. 298 Squadron in 1946 and Tempest F.2 fighters of Nos. 5 and 20 Squadrons in 1947. British units kept using the airfield after the partition of 1947 and finally left in 1956. In the first months of the new state the base also served Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, for domestic flights before Karachi’s airport was ready.

In April 1958 Air Marshal Asghar Khan opened the Flight Leaders’ School at Masroor, then still Mauripur, to teach the tactics that the PAF would use in 1965. The school faded after the war and was reborn in 1976 at Sargodha as the Combat Commanders’ School, which is why the PAF’s tactical tradition begins at Karachi but lives today in the Punjab.

On 24 May 1968 PAF Station Mauripur was renamed PAF Station Masroor, after its base commander, Air Commodore Masroor Hosain, and on 1 July 1970 all PAF stations became bases. In 1979, according to Wikipedia, No. 7 Squadron flew Martin B-57B Canberra bombers from here. Wikipedia’s description of the modern 32 Tactical Attack Wing as the largest air base in Pakistan and Asia by area is the article’s own claim and was not checked against another source.

Late in the morning of 20 August 1971 Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas, a student pilot, was preparing to take off from Masroor in a Lockheed T-33A trainer. His instructor, Flight Lieutenant Matiur Rahman, a Bengali officer, forced his way into the aircraft, meaning to fly it to India and join the Bangladesh liberation war. The jet got airborne and headed south-east; Minhas fought for the controls, and it crashed near Sujawal, about 32 miles from the Indian border. Both men died.

Pakistan made Minhas a national hero, awarding him the Nishan-e-Haider as the youngest recipient and the only one from the air force, and naming the base at Kamra after him. Bangladesh gave Rahman its highest award, the Bir Sreshtho. Four months later the war with India broke out and East Pakistan became Bangladesh. The two accounts of the same flight are each country’s official position, and this page gives both.

Under Southern Air Command, Masroor is the base of No. 32 Tactical Attack Wing. Wikipedia’s base article lists No. 2 Squadron on the JF-17 Block II, No. 8 Squadron on the Block III, No. 7 Squadron and No. 22 OCU on the Mirage III, a squadron of Shaanxi ZDK-03 special-mission aircraft and No. 84 Squadron’s AW139 rescue helicopters, along with the Tactical Air Support School and the College of Aviation Safety Management. The same pages disagree over where No. 7 and No. 22 are based today, and the PAF does not publish its order of battle, so this list should be read as indicative.

Masroor was not among the bases named in the Indian strikes of 10 May 2025 in the sources checked for this dataset; the Southern Air Command bases named were Bholari, Jacobabad and Sukkur.