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Sintra Air Base, officially Air Base No. 1 of the Portuguese Air Force, lies in the hills above Sintra Municipality west of Lisbon and has served as the country's principal pilot training station since the 1920s. It remains an active military field, home to the Air Force Academy and an elementary flying training squadron, and offers no scheduled civil traffic.
Sintra Air Base (Base Aérea de Sintra), designated Air Base No. 1 (BA1), is a Portuguese Air Force installation in the Sintra Municipality. It hosts the Portuguese Air Force Academy and a flying training squadron, making it one of the historic centres of military pilot instruction in Portugal. For a simulator pilot it is an interesting destination for its long training heritage rather than for any civil traffic, since it handles no regular passenger flights.
The base sits at Sintra, in the Lisbon District of Portugal, at coordinates 38.8311 N, 9.3396 W. As an active Portuguese Air Force base it is operated within military airspace rather than as a civil aerodrome.
Sintra has a single physical runway, 14/32, of 5,892 feet with a hard surface and runway lighting. There is no ILS.
Air traffic services are provided on APP 118.6 MHz, GND 122.1 MHz and TWR 119.85 MHz.
The base's origins trace to the Portuguese Army's School of Military Aeronautics, founded on 14 May 1914 and initially located at Vila Nova da Rainha before moving to Granja do Marquês on 5 February 1920. The school was disbanded in October 1939, when the site became Air Base No. 1, and it has since been the main centre for training Portuguese Air Force pilots and technicians, hosting aircraft such as the de Havilland Tiger Moth, North American T-6 Texan and Cessna T-37 Tweet over the decades. Between 1939 and the late 1940s the base was also home to ground-attack and bomber units flying the Breda Ba-65Bis and converted Junkers Ju 52/3m. It later housed the Basic Flight Training Group with its two training squadrons, and from 1966 to 2009 also supported transport, liaison, aerial photographic reconnaissance and maritime patrol squadrons, including 502 Squadron, transferred in from 1993. The Aérospatiale Epsilon TB-30-equipped 101 Squadron operated from Sintra between October 1989 and June 1993 before moving to Beja Air Base, then returned to Sintra in 2009 when 401 Squadron and 502 Squadron moved to Air Base No. 6 at Montijo.
Sintra Air Base remains an active Portuguese Air Force station, home to 101 Squadron 'Roncos', which conducts elementary and basic flying training, and to 802 Squadron 'Águias', the Air Force Academy's auxiliary squadron. The base also houses the Air Force Academy itself and the Portuguese Air Force's Air Museum. There are no regular commercial passenger flights operating from the field.
