The airfield at Kamra dates from 1942, one of the many built in north-western India during the Second World War, and Wikipedia records that it was upgraded in 1984. What sets it apart is the industry beside it. In the years after the 1965 war the PAF re-equipped with Chinese and French aircraft, and it needed somewhere to keep them flying. The first answer was the Aircraft Rebuild Factory, established in 1971 and working from 1972 to overhaul Chinese F-6s.

A Mirage Rebuild Factory followed in 1974, working from 1975, and it completed its first rebuilt Mirage III in 1980; an Aircraft Manufacturing Factory was set up in 1975 and an avionics and radar factory in 1983. Together they form the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex. The manufacturing factory builds the MFI-17 Mushshak trainer and has assembled the K-8 Karakorum jet trainer, while the rebuild lines still overhaul Mirages and F-7s.

The JF-17 Thunder, developed with China’s Chengdu Aircraft Corporation, turned Kamra into a fighter factory. Sub-assembly work began on 22 January 2008 and serial production on 30 June 2009, and No. 26 Squadron became the first JF-17 unit on 18 February 2010. The service now has about 175 JF-17s of all blocks, according to Wikipedia’s fleet list.

Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas was a student at Masroor, in Karachi, when on the morning of 20 August 1971 his instructor, Flight Lieutenant Matiur Rahman, a Bengali officer, forced his way into Minhas’s T-33 trainer. Rahman meant to fly it to India and join the Bangladesh liberation war, which by then had been under way for months. Minhas fought him for the controls, and the jet crashed near Sujawal, in the south of Sindh, about 32 miles from the Indian border. Both men were killed.

Pakistan awarded Minhas the Nishan-e-Haider posthumously: he is the youngest recipient and the only member of the air force to receive it, and the Kamra base was renamed in his memory. Bangladesh, after independence, gave Matiur Rahman its highest military award, the Bir Sreshtho. The same flight is therefore remembered as a heroic sacrifice in one country and a heroic escape attempt in the other, and this page records both positions without choosing between them.

In the early hours of 16 August 2012 militants of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan attacked Minhas. The Express Tribune, cited by Wikipedia, reported that nine attackers and two Pakistani security personnel were killed and that the base commander, Air Commodore Muhammad Azam, was shot in the shoulder but not seriously hurt. One Saab 2000 Erieye early-warning aircraft was destroyed and one or two other aircraft were damaged.

The attack came in the years of the Pakistani Taliban’s campaign against military installations, and the loss hurt: the Erieye was one of the newest and most expensive aircraft in the inventory, and the PAF had bought only four radar aircraft in its first order. More Erieyes were ordered in 2017 and 2020, and the fleet stood at nine in 2024, according to the service article.

On 11 March 2022 the first six Chengdu J-10CE fighters, delivered on 4 March, were inducted into No. 15 Squadron ‘Cobras’ at Minhas. Pakistan had announced 25 in December 2021 with an option for 11 more, and Wikipedia gave 20 in service by May 2025. The J-10CE carries the PL-15 long-range missile.

Pakistan says its J-10CEs shot down Indian aircraft, including Rafales, on 7 May 2025. An unnamed US official told Reuters with ‘high confidence’ that they downed at least two Indian aircraft. India’s Chief of Defence Staff acknowledged losses on 31 May without saying which aircraft or how many, and India disputes Pakistan’s overall figure of six. No Indian strike on Minhas itself was reported in the sources checked. These are claims and partial acknowledgements, not an agreed record.