Eighty years after US soldiers joked that Tinian had become an 'aircraft carrier,' the tiny Northern Mariana island is once again filling with aircraft. North Field, the sprawling WWII base that launched the B-29s which dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was abandoned in 1947 and swallowed by jungle. Now the US Air Force is clearing that overgrowth and repaving the old coral runways in a project backed by roughly $1.33 billion across three fiscal cycles.
The Pentagon insists North Field is only an alternate, contingency site supporting Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, about 100 miles south. The scale of work suggests otherwise: RED HORSE engineers, Navy Seabees and Marines have cleared millions of square feet of jungle, and the field formally restarted flight operations on 3 May. It even hosted 250 joint personnel during Exercise Valiant Shield. The reopening fits the Air Force's Agile Combat Employment doctrine — dispersing aircraft across multiple strips so an adversary can't knock out air power with a single missile strike, a direct response to China's DF-26 'Guam Killer' missile.
What makes North Field unusually resilient is its original WWII grid of four parallel runways, each roughly 10,000 feet long — among the biggest airports on Earth when built. Today's crews are simply paving over the Seabees' original footprint. The revived 9,800-foot main strip can take diverted fighters, tankers, bombers and even drone platforms like MQ-9 Reapers, while mobile defences such as the truck-mounted Avenger and MRIC missile-intercept systems tested this year can be flown in on C-130s.
For travellers, Tinian remains one of the Pacific's quietest islands — and one of its most historically layered. The atomic loading pits alongside Runway Able are still viewable today, standing reminders of where the Enola Gay's cargo was loaded. The island sits just a short flight from Guam via Tinian International Airport, and much of its WWII infrastructure, from Japanese-era fortifications to crumbling American runways, is explorable with barely another tourist in sight. Ironically, the military build-up — the Pentagon already leases two-thirds of the island — is restoring access to sites the jungle had hidden for decades.
Who should care: history buffs, WWII wrecks-and-relics travellers, and anyone ticking off Micronesia beyond Guam and Saipan. Watch this space, because Tinian's reopening means improved infrastructure, including upgrades to the island's seaport and fuel systems, that could slowly make the island easier to reach. Just be aware that parts of the old airfield are now active military grounds, so some areas may be off-limits or closed during exercises.
Story via Simple Flying
