Laughlin Air Force Base
US Air Force base near Del Rio, Texas, United States
Laughlin Air Force Base (IATA: DLF, ICAO: KDLF, FAA LID: DLF) is a facility of the United States Air Force located east of Del Rio, Texas.
Overview
Laughlin AFB, the largest pilot training base in the US Air Force, is home to the 47th Flying Training Wing of the Air Education and Training Command and the 96th Flying Training Squadron of the Air Force Reserve Command. On weekdays, the airfield sees more takeoffs and landings than any other airport in the country.
History
Laughlin Army Air Field
Laughlin AFB was originally named Laughlin Army Air Field on March 3, 1943, after Jack T. Laughlin, a B-17E Flying Fortress pilot. He was trained as a pilot and was actually co-pilot of B-17E, tail number 41-2476. On the day of his first bombing mission, he was bumped by the Group Commander Major Stanley K. Robinson (Robinson was co-pilot next to pilot Capt. Walter W. Sparks). Major Robinson brought along his own combat-experienced navigator, Lt. Richard Cease. Laughlin had no assigned position on the plane for the mission.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Laughlin Air Force Base” as uS Air Force base near Del Rio, Texas, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q982089. VIAF identifies the subject as 157141456. The Library of Congress control number is n83049048. Authority coordinates are 29.359, -100.778. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “Laughlin Air Force Base” 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.