Vicenza Airport
| Vicenza Airport Aeroporto di Vicenza “Tommaso Dal Molin” |
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| Characteristics | |
| ICAO code |
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| IATA code |
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| Coordinates | |
| Height above MSL | 39 m (128 ft ) |
| Transport links | |
| Distance from the city center | 3 km northwest of Vicenza |
| Street | Viale Arturo Ferrarin Via Sant'Antonino |
| train | Vicenza train station |
| Local transport | bus |
| Basic data | |
| opening | October 28, 1929 |
| operator | Aeroporti Vicentini SpA |
| Start-and runway | |
| 18/36 | 1500 m × 30 m asphalt |
The Vicenza airport ( Italian Aeroporto di Vicenza "Tommaso Dal Molin" ) was from 1929 to 2008 a civil and military airfield in the northwest of the northern Italian city of Vicenza . On the site of the former airfield there is now a barracks of the United States Army .
history
The airfield was built in 1929 on a site that had been made available by private individuals. The airfield was primarily used by the local Luftsportverein and its flight school . The province of Vicenza expanded the airfield area, which came under military control in 1933, but was still used primarily for civilian purposes. During the Second World War , Vicenza airfield was, among other things, the base of a bomber squadron, and from 1943 onwards for units of the German Air Force and the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana .
After the war, the aim was to develop the Vicenza airfield into the central commercial airport for Veneto and north-eastern Italy. After choosing new airports in Verona-Villafranca and Venice-Tessera , Vicenza lost its civil role, but gained military importance due to the escalating Cold War . From 1955 the city of Vicenza became the largest garrison of the US Army in Italy alongside Camp Darby near Livorno . The NATO command of the 5th Allied Tactical Air Force (5ATAF) was located at the airfield , which during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s led, among other things, Operation Deny Flight and the air warfare operations of Operation Allied Force . In 1998, the central operational command of the Italian Air Force was established at Vicenza airfield , which together with the renamed NATO command ( Combined Air Operations Center 5) moved to Poggio Renatico near Ferrara in 2003. After minor renovations, the Vicenza airport was able to reopen to civil traffic. The General Aviation in the province of Vicenza had airfields since 1947 Asiago and Thiene taken.
In 2000, the 173rd US Airborne Brigade was reactivated in Vicenza , whose battalions were predominantly in Germany at the time . Initially, an expansion of the US barracks Camp Ederle in the east of Vicenza was considered . After the NATO command withdrew from the airfield, a new building on the airfield was proposed, which the Italian government approved despite violent protests from various groups and the local population. In October 2008, flight operations ceased, and construction work on the new barracks began the following year.
Others
The airfield was named after sergeant Tommaso Dal Molin, who took part in the Schneider Trophy in 1929 as a pilot of the "high-speed school" of the Regia Aeronautica in Desenzano del Garda and took second place with his Macchi M.52 . In 1930 he was killed on a test flight over Lake Garda . The civil movement , which for a long time fought against the construction of the US barracks on the airfield, called itself "No Dal Molin".
The new barracks was inaugurated in July 2013. It is named after the Italian Alpini officer and partisan Renato Del Din, who was killed in an attack on an institution of the Italian fascist social republic in Tolmezzo in April 1944 . The main street within the barracks is still called Tommaso Dal Molin.
See also
Web links
- Airport data on World Aero Data ( 2006 )
- Vicenza Airport on forgottenairfields.com (English)
- Aviation history in Vicenza on www.vicenzapiu.com (Italian)
- Information about the airfield museum