Tyndall Air Force Base: Guarding the Gulf Since Pearl Harbor

East of Panama City, on a peninsula reaching into the bay, sits Tyndall Air Force Base, one of the most storied military airfields in the country. Its timing is haunting. Tyndall Field first opened its doors on the seventh of December, nineteen forty one, the very same day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and pulled the United States into the Second World War.

It began as an aerial gunnery school, and the first of some two thousand troops arrived that day, with the first class of gunnery students starting the following February. The base was named for a First World War pilot, First Lieutenant Frank Benjamin Tyndall, a Silver Star recipient credited with shooting down six German planes deep behind enemy lines in nineteen eighteen. In the twenty first century Tyndall became a training home for the F twenty two Raptor, one of the most advanced fighter jets ever built.

Then, on the tenth of October, twenty eighteen, Hurricane Michael struck it head on as a Category Five storm. The base was devastated. Rather than abandon it, the Air Force chose to rebuild Tyndall as what it calls a Base of the Future, with hardened, storm resilient construction meant to survive the next great hurricane.