The Karelia Air Wing begins in the Finnish Civil War. In March and April 1918 Flight Detachment II (Lento-osasto II) was set up at Antrea on the Karelian Isthmus, a town that now lies in Russia as Kamennogorsk. Colonel Aarne Sihvo created the separate air unit in mid-April. On 13 April 1918 Senior Lieutenant Otto Ilmarinen flew the first reconnaissance sortie over the front, from 07.35 to 08.10, and on 23 April General Mannerheim ordered the detachment attached to the aviation department of the Finnish Air Force.

On 15 June 1918 the detachment moved to Utti in the Kymi valley and became Utti air station. On 28 September 1918 the first Utti pilot course reached its solo stage, and that date is still kept as the wing’s anniversary. After a winter at Santahamina in Helsinki the unit returned to Utti in July 1919 as Air Station II. Utti would remain the home of the lineage for more than four decades.

In the Winter War the unit was Flight Regiment 2 under Colonel Richard Lorentz. The official history says its squadrons, Nos. 24, 26 and 28, shot down 198 enemy aircraft for 31 combat losses. The most famous action came on 6 January 1940, when Lieutenant Jorma Sarvanto, flying a Fokker D.XXI from Utti, shot down six Ilyushin DB-3 bombers of a formation of seven heading for Kuopio. The Air Force puts the time at four to five minutes; the wing history says five.

In the Continuation War the fighter regiments, Nos. 2 and 3, claimed about 1,600 enemy aircraft for 253 of their own lost, and 11 of their pilots received the Mannerheim Cross. These are the wing history’s figures; the Air Force’s own service history gives 182 aircraft lost for the whole Air Force, so the two totals are counted on different bases. At the start of 1952 the regiments became wings, and Utti’s unit became the 3rd Wing (3. Lennosto).

Jets forced the move. Utti’s runways were unpaved sand, which a jet fighter could use only in winter, and the wing history recalls the Air Force joke that falling snow was “Utti’s asphalt”. In the mid-1950s the decision was taken to move the wing away from Utti. The new site was Rissala in the municipality of Siilinjärvi, north of Kuopio in North Savo, where an airfield had been built on the eve of the Winter War.

Fighter Squadron 31 went first. On 20 April 1960 it moved to Rissala with Fouga Magister jet trainers, and in 1961 the wing followed and took the name Karelia Air Wing (Karjalan lennosto), keeping the Karelian name of its birthplace hundreds of kilometres away. Rissala has been its home ever since, and the wing’s postal address is in nearby Toivala.

The base shares its runway with Kuopio Airport, a single 2,800-metre asphalt strip, 15/33. Wikipedia, used here only as a finding aid, says the civil airport was completed in November 1939, opened to traffic in May 1940 and was used by the Luftwaffe in 1942–1943; those points have not been confirmed from an official source.

In 1962 Finland bought a squadron’s worth of MiG-21F interceptors from the Soviet Union and based them with the Karelia Air Wing at Rissala. The Air Force’s service history dates the purchase to 1962; its fleet list gives the 22 MiG-21F-13s a service life of 1963 to 1986. From 1972 the Air Force also flew the Swedish-built Draken, so Soviet and Western fighters served in Finland side by side.

The fleet list records four MiG-15UTI two-seat trainers (1962–1977) and six MiG-21U/UM two-seaters (1965–1981) alongside the fighters. From 1978 the radar-equipped MiG-21bis arrived, 26 in all, and served until 1998. The wing’s own history counts 35 years of MiG-21 flying at Rissala.

The Air Force’s official list of military aviation accidents since 1970 shows the cost. It records ten Karelia Air Wing MiG-21s lost between 1970 and 1995, three of them fatal: at Joroinen in 1970, Kiuruvesi in 1982 and Tammisaari in 1992. The causes named include a pull-up flown too low during formation aerobatics, loss of spatial orientation in cloud and in bad weather, turbine failures, a landing-gear fault on a night flight and an oil-tank cap that came open in flight. The MiG-21bis left service in 1998.

Finland ordered 64 F/A-18 Hornets in 1992: 57 single-seat C models assembled in Finland and seven two-seat D models built in the United States. The first six D models came in November 1995 and the series was complete in 2000. At Rissala the Hornet replaced the MiG-21 in 1998, and Fighter Squadron 31 has flown it since.

Today the squadron holds rapid readiness for surveillance and identification of aircraft in the airspace of southern Finland, working with the 5th and 7th Command Centres. The wing’s own front page puts its area of responsibility more broadly as eastern Finland, watched every day of the year. The wing employs about 500 people and trains about 250 conscripts. Besides the headquarters and Fighter Squadron 31, it has the 7th Command Centre, a Flight Technical Squadron of 168 people, a communications technical centre, a maintenance centre and a force protection unit.

Rissala has trained senior Air Force leaders. Timo Herranen commanded the wing, then called Karelia Air Command, around 2020 and became Commander of the Finnish Air Force on 1 December 2024. Lieutenant Colonel Inka Niskanen became the first woman to command a Finnish fighter squadron when she took over Fighter Squadron 31 on 1 January 2019. Yle reported that the squadron then had 50–100 personnel and 20–25 aircraft. The Hornet is now in its last years at Rissala. Captain Ville Tuomainen, who leads the squadron’s weapons tactics section, flew the Air Force’s Hornet solo display in 2026.

On 10 December 2021 Finland chose the Lockheed Martin F-35A: 64 aircraft, with about 777 million euros set aside for infrastructure. The Lapland Air Wing at Rovaniemi received the first aircraft in Finland on 18 September 2026. The Karelia Air Wing is next: the Defence Forces plan says its F-35s arrive in 2028, with full operational capability at the end of 2030, when the Hornet leaves service.

Planning at Rissala began in 2022 and building began in 2023. By September 2023 the Air Force commander, Major General Juha-Pekka Keränen, could point to visible work: a new arresting cable had replaced the barrier net on the runway, and half of the military apron had been rebuilt, with the other half due the next summer.

The wing’s October 2025 update listed protective shelters, maintenance facilities, training spaces, storage buildings and airfield structures. New barracks opened in early 2025, and a joint building for dining, health services and the military club was due in 2026. The chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Samuli Tanttu, said the work was on schedule and that the aim was to finish most of it during 2027, so the wing is ready for the first F-35s during 2028.

The official dates move slightly between sources. The Defence Forces HX page gives initial operational capability as the end of 2027, while releases from 2024 and 2026 say the beginning of 2028. From 2028 to 2030 Rissala will fly the Hornet and the F-35A side by side.

Finland has long planned to disperse its fighters to road bases in a crisis, and the Karelia Air Wing trains for it close to home. In autumn 2025 the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency’s Highway 9 project gave the wing a new alternate landing site, according to the wing. From 18 to 25 November 2026 the wing’s Hornets are due to exercise from the Jännevirta emergency landing site, with Highway 9 closed at the airport.

Since Finland joined NATO on 4 April 2023, allies have come to the wing’s roads. In NATO’s Ramstein Flag 26 exercise in June 2026, with more than 200 aircraft from 18 nations, the Karelia Air Wing opened the Tervo highway strip in North Savo. Colonel Vesa Mäntylä said the aim was to give allies first experience of road-base flying, including hot-pit refuelling. Finnish Hornets, US Marine Corps F-35Bs, Spanish EF-18s and Polish F-16s and M-346s flew from Tervo.

NATO membership also touched an old symbol. The Air Force used the blue swastika as its national marking from 1918 to 1945, a symbol that came with its first aircraft, a gift from the Swedish Count Eric von Rosen, and that has no Nazi origin. In August 2025 the Associated Press reported that four Air Force unit flags that still carried it would be redesigned around an eagle. It quoted Colonel Tomi Böhm, then new at the head of the Karelia Air Wing, who said the change would avoid awkward moments with foreign visitors.