Qualla: Pope Field

Pope Field: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

First Lieutenant Harley Halbert Pope did not get to see the field that bears his name. On January 7, 1919, the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny he was flying came down in the Cape Fear River and he drowned. The Army was building a field artillery post nearby - Camp Bragg, named for the Confederate general Braxton Bragg - and the new aviation landing strip needed a name. The War Department settled on Pope. The field that opened later that year became one of the oldest installations in what would become the Air Force, and a century later it still sends paratroopers into the sky out of Fort Bragg's drop zones.

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Pope Field: Observation and the Mail

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first eight years at Pope were a slow march of observation balloons and biplanes - photographing terrain for mapping, spotting for the artillery batteries at Camp Bragg, watching for forest fires, hauling mail. In December 1927 the field hosted tactics experiments that would ...

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Pope Field: Putting the Air in Airborne

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

World War II changed Pope's character permanently. As Fort Bragg became the home of paratrooper training, Pope became the field that took those paratroopers up. Air and ground crews learned the rhythm of mass jumps, aerial resupply, troop carrier formation flying. The field staye...

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Pope Field: The Flying Tigers

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1992 Pope became the home of the new 23rd Wing - a composite outfit blending the airlift C-130s of the 317th with the A-10 Warthogs of the 75th Fighter Squadron and, later, the F-16s and then more A-10s of the 74th Fighter Squadron. The 74th carried the Flying Tigers lineage f...

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Pope Field: Back to the Army

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2005 Base Realignment process started a long handover. A-10s moved to Moody, Georgia. C-130s went to Little Rock. The 23rd Fighter Group rejoined the 23rd Wing in 2006; the last three A-10s left for Moody in December 2007. The Air Force Reserve's 440th Airlift Wing moved in f...

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Pope Field: Quiet Specialty

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What remains at Pope is less visible than the C-130 wing it lost but in some ways more strategic. The 43rd Air Mobility Operations Group still handles the en-route work that gets 82nd Airborne paratroopers from this ramp to drop zones anywhere on earth, often inside 18 hours of t...

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