According to the US "Stars and Stripes" 27**, the US Air Force is reactivating the airfield used to take off and drop atomic bombers to Japan, in order to seek a base that "can be used to disperse its Pacific forces in wartime."
On August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" landed at a base on Tinian Island after dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima **U.S. Air Force.
The report quoted Kenneth Wells**, commander of U.S. Pacific Air Forces, as saying in an interview with Nikkei Asia on December 13 that the airport north of Tinian Island (hereinafter referred to as "North Airport"), in addition to another predominantly civilian Tinian International Airport in the southwest of Tinian Island, is "recovering from the overgrown jungle since World War II." Tinian Island is one of the three major islands of the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, located 5 km southwest of Saipan and 160 km northeast. By 1945, the military airfield north of Tinian Island had four 8,500-foot (2,590 meters) long runways for the B-29 Super Fortress to take off from Japan and was abandoned in 1947.
1945 Tinian Island North Airport **Social**.
Aerial view of the abandoned Tinian Island North Airport **dvids
In 2003, the airfield underwent an initial clean-up as a result of the exercise, and on December 5, 2013, a U.S. Marine Corps KC-130J Super Hercules landed on the cleared runway, and the airfield was subsequently used at low intensity only for part of the exercise. Wells said there is a "wide [runway] pavement beneath the "overgrown jungle" at the North Airport, which will be cleared between now and next summer, and told Nikkei Asia that "if you keep an eye out for it in the next few months, we'll see significant progress," though Wells did not provide a specific timeline for the airport's commissioning.
During the 2020 exercise Cope North, a U.S. Air Force C-130J transport plane was on Tinian Island, and participating Japanese Self-Defense Force personnel watched the Stars and Stripes.
The Stars and Stripes newspaper reported that the U.S. Pacific Air Force confirmed the authenticity of the above information in an email sent to the newspaper on Tuesday. Earlier, on December 18, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2024 to renovate Tinian Island's diversion airfield.
In August, Brigadier General Michael Zulsdorf, deputy director of the U.S. Air Force's reinforcing director of engineering, logistics and force protection facilities, said at a seminar that the military would invest in the old airfields, where there were still usable housing and other fixed facilities, and restore some of the base facilities to "revitalize them." He said the plan would build a robust infrastructure to support "agile combat employment," a wartime network of U.S. Air Force aircraft evacuation to a large number of smaller airfields to avoid being targeted by missiles.
On February 16, 2021, four U.S. Air Force F-35As part of the Agile Operational Deployment exercise at Elson Air Force Base in Alaska, landed at an airstrip northwest of **.
The report claims that because Chinese missiles can hit major U.S. bases in the western Pacific region, it also means that the U.S. Air Force is looking for more places that can be used to disperse and deploy aircraft in wartime, and Tinian Island is part of the World War II airfield complex that the U.S. military has repaired for evacuation and diversion throughout the western Pacific region. Just last month, the U.S. completed a $24 million runway upgrade at Barsha Air Base in Luzon, Philippines, in addition to the U.S.-Philippines Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which allows U.S. forces to operate in eight other locations in the Philippines.
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