3rd Special Operations Helicopter Regiment "Aldebaran"
military unit
The 3rd Special Operations Helicopter Regiment "Aldebaran" (Italian: 3° Reggimento Elicotteri per Operazioni Speciali "Aldebaran") is an Italian Army regiment based at Viterbo Airport in Lazio. The regiment is part of the army aviation and assigned to the Airmobile Brigade "Friuli". The regiment supports the special forces and ranger regiments of the Army Special Forces Command. The regiment's anniversary falls, as for all Italian Army aviation units, on 10 May 1953, the day the aviation speciality was founded.
History
On 24 July 1964, the Light Aircraft Section was formed at Alghero–Fertilia Airport in Sardinia. The section was tasked with support the Italian Armed Forces' Special Units Grouping, which guarded military intelligence installations in Sardinia and was tasked with training the direct action personnel of the Italian Armed Forces' intelligence agency SISMI. In 1976, the section was expanded and then renamed 399th Light Aircraft Squadron. In November 1989, the squadron was used to form the 39th Squadrons Group "Drago", which was equipped with AB 412A helicopters.
During the 1975 army reform, the Light Aviation Unit "Folgore" of the Paratroopers Brigade "Folgore" based the at Pisa-San Giusto Air Base was reorganized as 26th Squadrons Group "Giove". During the same reform the 1st Army Light Aviation Grouping "Antares" reorganized its I General Use Helicopters Unit as 51st Multirole Helicopters Squadrons Group "Leone".
On 15 December 1993, the 3rd Army Aviation Regiment "Aldebaran" was formed at Bresso Airport near Milan by reorganizing the 3rd Army Corps' Light Aviation Command.
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This entry incorporates text from “3rd Special Operations Helicopter Regiment "Aldebaran"” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.