Qualla: Natal Air Force Base

Natal Air Force Base: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit edsonaoki, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Americans stationed here described their base as the vertex of a triangle. The other two points were North Africa and southern Europe, and the arrangement had a name that stuck to the whole city: Trampolim da Vitória, the Trampoline of Victory. Natal sits on the northeastern shoulder of South America, closer to Africa than anywhere else the Allies could reliably use, and in a war shaped by how far an aeroplane could fly on a tank of fuel, that accident of geography became strategy. Aircraft bound for the Mediterranean and the desert war left from a red-dirt plain called Parnamirim.

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Image: edsonaoki | CC BY-SA 3.0

Natal Air Force Base: A Signature in July 1941

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexandro Dias, CC BY-SA 4.0. Brazil was still formally neutral when President Getúlio Vargas signed a defence agreement in July 1941 that let the United States build air bases along the country's north and northeast coast. On 2 March 1942 Vargas created Natal Air Force Base — BANT — by converting a former Fr...

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Image: Alexandro Dias | CC BY-SA 4.0

Natal Air Force Base: Six Thousand Pairs of Hands

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit silvioraof, CC BY 2.0. Roughly six thousand workers built Parnamirim Field, and most of them came from the dry interior of Rio Grande do Norte — people from a countryside that drought regularly emptied, walking toward wages on a coast suddenly full of them. They were not passing through. They put up a ...

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Image: silvioraof | CC BY 2.0

Natal Air Force Base: The Shortest Way to Africa

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andre Gustavo Stumpf Filho from Brasil, CC BY 2.0. Once the South Atlantic ferry route opened, the wing responsible for it moved its headquarters to Parnamirim Field, and the traffic promptly outran the facilities. Through 1942, aircraft, materiel and mail piled up at Natal faster than they could be flown onward across the ocean....

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Image: Andre Gustavo Stumpf Filho from Brasil | CC BY 2.0

Natal Air Force Base: 28 January 1943

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Underwood, CC BY-SA 2.0. The USS Humboldt tied up at the Port of Natal on 28 January 1943 carrying Franklin Roosevelt, on his way home from the Casablanca Conference. Getúlio Vargas came to meet him. What the two presidents worked out on the Potengi river — the Potengi Conference, as Brazilians call it —...

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Image: Robert Underwood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Natal Air Force Base: Ala 10

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. In October 1946, a little over a year after the war ended, the United States handed Parnamirim Field to the Brazilian Air Force. It has been Brazilian ever since, and today the installation is Natal Air Force Base, Ala 10. Six squadrons work from it: 1º/5ºGAv "Rumba" and the 2ºET...

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Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

Natal Air Force Base: The Runways Go Quiet, Then Don't

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rafael Luiz Canossa, CC BY-SA 2.0. For decades the base shared its concrete with Augusto Severo International Airport, the civil terminal that handled Natal's airline traffic. That ended on 31 May 2014, when scheduled flights moved to a new airport built inland at São Gonçalo do Amarante and the military got its f...

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Image: Rafael Luiz Canossa | CC BY-SA 2.0