The first airstrip appeared here in the 1930s, unpaved and rough, built to train young Soviet pilots. When German forces occupied Crimea during the Second World War, they expanded the field and laid down paved runways whose ruined edges are still visible today. After the war, the Soviet Navy's Black Sea Fleet claimed Saky as a major base. Reconnaissance regiments flew from it, then torpedo squadrons, then fighters. The airfield also played a quiet supporting role in something far stranger than aerial patrols: it served the nearby Center for Deep Space Communications outside Yevpatoria, one of the antennae through which the Soviet Union listened for its probes among the planets. A field built for warplanes had become, briefly, a doorway to the solar system.

In 1982, Saky took on a role no other Soviet base could claim. The USSR was building aircraft carriers at Mykolaiv, but it had no way to teach pilots the brutal art of landing on a moving deck. So engineers built the deck on land. They installed arresting gear to catch tailhooks and raised a full-sized replica of the bow of the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, complete with the upward-curving ski-jump ramp that flung jets into the air. Pilots practiced the impossible geometry of carrier flight over solid ground, hurling themselves off a ramp that led nowhere. Known by the acronym NITKA, it was the only shore-based carrier trainer the Soviet Navy ever had, a ship's deck marooned in a field of Crimean grass.

The Soviet Union dissolved, but its warplanes remained parked where they had always been. In January 1992, many personnel of the newly stationed 100th Independent Shipborne Fighter Aviation Regiment refused to swear allegiance to Ukraine and departed for Russia, abandoning their aircraft behind them. For years afterward the base existed in an uneasy arrangement, Ukrainian by sovereignty yet leased to and flown by the Russian Navy. That ambiguity ended violently in 2014. As Russian forces seized Crimea, Ukrainian crews raced to get a handful of aircraft airborne and out to the mainland, but more than a dozen planes and helicopters under repair had to be left where they sat. In the days that followed, a Ukrainian naval officer awaiting relocation, Major Stanislav Karachevsky, was shot dead in a dormitory building as families packed to leave, one man's death standing for the many lives upended when the base changed hands.

On the ninth of August 2022, the sky over Saky erupted. Explosions tore across the airfield, and satellite images afterward showed craters and the burned skeletons of at least eight aircraft, most of them parked in the open, away from the shelter of hangars. Western assessments concluded that the events of that single day put more than half of the Black Sea Fleet's naval aviation jets out of service. Further strikes followed in 2023 and again in early 2024. The old field that once welcomed Roosevelt and Churchill, that once launched jets off a landlocked ship's bow, has become one of the most closely watched stretches of runway on the northern Black Sea, its history written in arrivals and, now, in fire.