The French Air Force opened an air training center here in 1951, beginning to build the aviation capability of the fledgling Republic of Vietnam Air Force from almost nothing. By March 1952 the base was training pilots, navigators, and maintenance crews for what would eventually become the RVNAF. The American presence arrived quietly in January 1953, when maintenance personnel from the USAF 24th Air Depot Wing at Clark Air Base in the Philippines flew in on temporary duty to service Douglas C-47 Skytrains that the United States had supplied to France. They handed those duties back to French crews in August 1953. It was the first of many handoffs — each one a negotiation about who, exactly, was responsible for this war.

By the early 1960s the base had become a hub for the shadow war that preceded full American involvement. In December 1961 the RVNAF 2nd Fighter Squadron formed here, flying North American T-28 Trojans. Four USAF pilots from Operation Farm Gate arrived in late 1961 to train their Vietnamese counterparts — a program officially described as advisory, though the line between training and flying was often thin. The 14th Air Commando Wing activated at Nha Trang on 8 March 1966, making the base its home until October 1969. During those years the field hosted AC-47 Spooky gunships, medevac helicopters from the 57th Medical Detachment flying HU-1A Iroquois, and the 8th Field Hospital — a full apparatus of military medicine and firepower concentrated in a city that civilians continued to inhabit a few kilometres away.

From mid-1969 onward, Vietnamization — the policy of transferring combat responsibility back to South Vietnamese forces — began dismantling the American presence at Nha Trang systematically. Units relocated or inactivated. By October 1969 all organized USAF combat units had departed, leaving 800 American support personnel. On 30 June 1969, the Douglas AC-47 Spooky gunships of D Flight, 3rd Special Operations Squadron were transferred to the RVNAF — the Spookies and their crews gone, the mission continuing under new ownership. The base formally passed to RVNAF control in 1970. Five years later, as the Republic of Vietnam collapsed, the field passed again — this time to the Vietnam People's Air Force, the fourth air force to operate from this particular strip of coastal ground.

After reunification the airfield continued in military use under the Socialist Republic of Vietnam before eventually being closed in 2009. It sat largely idle for years, a large swath of prime coastal real estate on the southern edge of a city that had become one of Vietnam's leading beach resort destinations. In January 2016 the government announced that the base would be sold for redevelopment — the indicative value set at US$540 million. The concrete and hardstands that once supported gunships and medevac helicopters were being assessed for their market value, a different kind of accounting than the one kept in the decades when this airfield's ledger was measured in sorties and casualties.