Construction began in 1942 under the name Fairfield-Suisun Army Air Base. The original plan called for medium attack bombers, but the War Department had other ideas. By October of that year, the base was assigned to the Air Transport Command, and its wartime mission became ferrying aircraft and supplies to the Pacific Theater. When the Air Force became a separate service in 1947, the installation was renamed Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base. Two years later, Strategic Air Command took control and transformed the base into a nuclear bomber installation. B-29 Superfortresses gave way to B-36 Peacemakers, which gave way to B-52 Stratofortresses. Runways were widened, hangars multiplied, and permanent quarters replaced temporary barracks. For nine years, airlift was secondary to the business of nuclear deterrence.

In 1958, the Military Air Transport Service reclaimed Travis, and the base returned to what geography had always suited it for: moving things west. The shift defined the next three decades. The 60th Military Airlift Wing arrived in 1966, bringing with it the C-141 Starlifter, the Air Force's first all-jet heavy airlifter. In 1970, the wing began operating the C-5 Galaxy, the largest aircraft in the Air Force inventory -- a plane so enormous that its cargo hold can swallow six Greyhound buses. The Air Force Reserve's 349th Wing joined as an associate unit in 1969, and the two wings eventually blended their crews so seamlessly that active-duty and reserve personnel flew the same missions on the same aircraft. When the Cold War ended and the Air Force reorganized in 1992, Travis came under the new Air Mobility Command, adding KC-10 Extender aerial refueling tankers to its fleet.

The numbers tell a story the base's nickname does not fully capture. Approximately 7,390 active-duty personnel, 3,260 reservists, and 3,690 civilians work at Travis, making it the largest employer in both Fairfield and Solano County. The base's annual economic impact exceeds one billion dollars. Military families and retirees have settled permanently in the surrounding communities, and the skilled workforce the base produces feeds into the region's labor pool long after uniforms are retired. David Grant USAF Medical Center, a 265-bed teaching hospital on base, serves both active-duty and retired military personnel -- a $200 million facility that functions as the region's de facto military healthcare hub. Travis is not just a runway and a control tower. It is a small city grafted onto a larger one, with its own medical system, housing, schools, and economic gravity.

The fleet has evolved continuously. The C-141 Starlifters were retired in 1997, transferred to other wings across the country. The C-17 Globemaster III arrived in 2006 -- Travis named its first one the Spirit of Solano -- bringing a more versatile airlifter that could land on shorter, rougher runways in austere environments. In January 2017, the Air Force announced that Travis would receive 24 Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tankers, the replacement for the aging KC-10. The first Pegasus arrived on July 28, 2023. Travis's final KC-10 departed for storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona on September 26, 2024, closing a chapter that had begun when the aerial refueling mission first came to Travis in 1992. Today the 60th Air Mobility Wing operates C-5M Galaxies, C-17 Globemaster IIIs, and KC-46 Pegasus tankers -- making it the largest wing in Air Mobility Command.

Between 2018 and 2023, a company called Flannery Associates quietly purchased over 50,000 acres of land surrounding Travis Air Force Base, spending nearly a billion dollars in the process. The purchases triggered federal investigations into who was behind the acquisitions and why someone would want that much farmland next to an active military installation. In August 2023, the mystery was resolved -- or at least reframed. Flannery Associates was a subsidiary of California Forever, a venture backed by Silicon Valley investors who planned to build an entirely new city on the land. The proposal turned Travis from a military logistics story into an urban planning controversy, raising questions about water rights, agricultural preservation, and what it means to drop a planned community next to the busiest military air terminal in the country. The debate continues, and the base watches from behind its fences, doing what it has done since 1942: moving things west.