27th Air Division
division of the United States Air Force
The 27th Air Division was a United States Air Force numbered air division and the geographic Air Defense Command region controlled by the 27th AD. Its last assignment was with Air Defense Command (ADC)'s Tenth Air Force, at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona. It was inactivated on 19 November 1969.
Norton AFB
Activated as the 27 Air Division (Defense) on 7 September 1950, the unit was assigned to ADC for most of its existence, the division's initial air defense area was southern California and later southern Nevada (and a small portion of Arizona by 1953).
The 4705th Defense Wing was a temporary unit that absorbed the 1st Fighter-Interceptor Wing's personnel and equipment five days after it was organized in early 1952 at Norton Air Force Base. These units included, for example, the 94th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at George Air Force Base). The wing was discontinued and the 94th FIS reassigned directly to 27th Air Division, which had reorganized at Norton in February, one month later.
In May 1958, the 27th AD directed a hostile intercept of a "declared unknown" aircraft (without proper IFF), but the "interceptor pilot remembered...that opening bomb bay doors was to be considered a hostile act only after declaration of an Air Defense Emergency or Warning Yellow or Red" (the SAC B-47 was on a Radar Bomb Scoring bomb run near the Los Angeles Bomb Plot.) The 27th AD was designated 1 of 23 NORAD divisions effective 10 June 1958 by NORAD General Order 6.
Rocky Mountain Division
The "27th Air Division (Rocky Mountain)" was to transfer to the midwest with command of 2 NORAD sectors (Reno and Denver Air Defense Sectors) during deployment of SAGE. In addition to a hardened Air Defense Direction Center at Stead Air Force Base for the Reno sector; NORAD's 25 July 1958 SAGE Geographic Reorganization Plan identified the Super Combat Center/Direction Center (SCC/DC) nuclear bunker for the division was to be at Denver, Colorado (cf. the bunkers later planned for the Cheyenne Mountain Complex and in a Cripple Creek mine). The division's general area was west-to-east from the western Nevada state meridian (near the Sierra Escarpment) to the Great Plains near Oakley, Kansas; and north–south from mid-Wyoming to just south of the Four Corners latitude.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4632571. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1950, 1953 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “27th Air Division” 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.