Prüm Air Station
The Prüm Air Station is a former US radar station approx. 8 km north of Prüm in Rhineland-Palatinate . It was built in the 1950s and served for communication between NATO and the US armed forces in the surrounding military bases Bitburg Air Base and Spangdahlem Air Base as well as the US Department of Defense . The facility was closed in 2004.
In addition to radio traffic, one of the main tasks of the Prüm Air Station was to monitor radar using a mobile 407L unit. During the Cold War , around 1,000 US soldiers were stationed in the Schneifelwald , including around 100 civilian employees. The majority of them lived in the abbey town of Prüm in the Prüm Housing , the rest in the surrounding villages, such as Niederprüm , Weinsheim .
With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, the radar station increasingly lost its importance, which resulted in the withdrawal of American troops from Prüm in the early 1990s. As a result, the demolition of the barracks began, the radio system remained in place for the time being and around 30 military employees continued to do their job. However, your mission was different, namely to send weather data to Spangdahlem Air Base .
This order ended in the summer of 2004, as the US military now receives the weather data via German weather satellites . The military facility around the radio tower was serviced until autumn 2011, after which this last part of the area was also handed over to the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks .
Stationed units
During the Cold War, the following units were located at the Prüm Air Station:
- 601st Tactical Control Squadron
- 612st Tactical Control Flight
- 447th Signal Battalion
- 7025th Air Postal Squadron
- 2139th Communication Squadron
- 66th Hdqtrs Sqdn (Sembach and Zweibrucken AB)
Web links
Press article about the Air Station
Coordinates: 50 ° 17 ′ 0 ″ N , 6 ° 24 ′ 0 ″ E