Drafted — not technically validated
Record revision 1 · The classified Air Force test site beside Groom Lake, where the U-2, A-12 and F-117 were tested.
A real-world airfield as described in public sources, and how sim maps represent it. Units, facilities and names change; each is dated where the sources allow, and the charts are not for navigation. Use current official publications for flight planning.
Location and identity
- Location
- Beside Groom Lake, a salt flat inside the Nevada Test and Training Range, north-north-west of Las Vegas, Nevada [1]
- Country or territory
- United States
- Coordinates
- 37.2350° N, 115.8110° W [2]
- Elevation
- 4,494 ft (1,370 m) [1]
- Identifiers
- ICAO KXTA
- Other names
- Opened
- 1942, as Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field with two unpaved 5,000 ft runways; the CIA established the test facility in April 1955 [1]
- Theatre
- North America
Role and operators
- Status
- Active · Military
- Roles today
- Flight test
- Operators
- US Air Force, a remote detachment administered by Edwards Air Force Base · United States, air force · current; start date not given [1]
- Central Intelligence Agency, established the test facility for the U-2 and ran the A-12 OXCART programme here · United States, government (non-military) · from 1955, end not given [1]
Units
Permanently based units belong to the airfield; rotational and temporarily deployed units are there for a period or an operation. Dates are when the sources place each unit there; "as of" is when a source described it as current.
Earlier
4450th Tactical Group, the first F-117A unit, before its move to Tonopah [1]
- Service
- United States, air force
- Basing
- Permanently based
- Aircraft
- F-117A, A-7D
- When
- Oct 1979 – 1983
Runways and facilities
The sources do not date these figures. Facilities not listed here are not documented in the sources cited, which does not mean the airfield lacks them.
| Runway | Length | Width | Surface |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14L/32R [1] | 11,998 ft (3,657 m) | Not given | asphalt |
| 12/30 [1] [2]part of a taxiway, usable as a runway when announced by NOTAM; OurAirports marks it closed | 5,420 ft (1,652 m) | Not given | paved |
| 09L/27R and 09R/27L [1] | 11,385 ft (3,470 m) | Not given | dry lake bed (unpaved) |
| 03L/21R and 03R/21L [1] | 10,000 ft (3,048 m) | Not given | dry lake bed (unpaved) |
- Arresting gear
- None documented in the sources cited
- Navaids
- None documented in the sources cited
- Other
- The surrounding airspace is restricted area R-4808N, and Dreamland is the approach control callsign for the area [1]
Figure 1 — Airfield map of Homey Airport (Groom Lake, Area 51) (to scale)
- Runway
- Taxiway
- Apron
- Hangar or terminal
- Helipad
- Airfield boundary
Runways, taxiways, aprons and buildings inside the airfield boundary, true north up, drawn from OpenStreetMap data retrieved 2026-11-02. Widths come from the map data or, where it gives none, a typical 45 m runway and 18 m taxiway. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the ODbL 1.0. Community-mapped, not an official aerodrome chart, and not for navigation.
Sim maps
Represented in: DCS: Nevada Test and Training Range
DCS: Nevada Test and Training Range DCS World · Present day
Only the maps marked represented or confirmed absent have been checked. Any other map may or may not represent this airfield.
Role today
Groom Lake is a highly classified US Air Force facility, a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base, officially called Homey Airport and better known as Area 51. [1] Its operations are not made public; the Air Force calls it an open training range, and it is commonly thought to support the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons. [1] The CIA acknowledged the base publicly in June 2013. [1] Its identifier KXTA appeared in a commercial navigation database in December 2007, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association advised that student pilots be warned never to use it as a waypoint or destination. [1]
History
The first airfield here opened in 1942, as an auxiliary field of Indian Springs with two unpaved runways. [1] The CIA set up the Groom Lake test facility in April 1955 for Project AQUATONE, the development of the Lockheed U-2. [1] For the A-12 OXCART from 1960, contractors built a 10,000 ft runway, 14/32, diagonally across the south-west corner of the lake bed and marked two unpaved crosswind strips on the lake itself. [1]
The Have Blue stealth demonstrator first flew here in December 1977, and the first full-scale YF-117A flew on 18 June 1981. [1] The 4450th Tactical Group was formed in October 1979 to bring the F-117A into service and was based here at first, flying A-7Ds as stand-in trainers, before moving to Tonopah Test RangeTonopah Test Range Airport AirfieldThe remote range airfield that hid Constant Peg's MiGs and the first F-117 wing, and now stores the F-117 fleet. from 1982. [1] Since then the base and its runways have been expanded further, and in 1995 the government closed the nearby mountains that had given the only public view of it. [1]
The airfield
The paved main runway, 14L/32R, is 3,657 m (about 12,000 ft) long. [1] Two pairs of runways marked on the dry lake bed, 09/27 and 03/21, are about 11,400 and 10,000 ft long. [1]
Sources
- Area 51. Wikipedia (secondary source). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51 (accessed 2026-11-01). Infobox runways, the Groom Lake geography and the U-2, OXCART and Have Blue/F-117 history sections.
- Airport and runway data, KXTA. OurAirports open data (public domain, community-maintained). https://davidmegginson.github.io/ourairports-data/airports.csv (accessed 2026-11-01). Rows for KXTA in airports.csv and runways.csv: position and runway 12/30. The FAA's airport database has no entry for XTA.
- dcs-world-schema reference data: Nevada airbases (Groom Lake.json). dcs-world-schema, open-source data extracted by running DCS World 2.9.30.28536. https://github.com/YoloWingPixie/dcs-world-schema/blob/c3091e6c08fb8167e26145d0e33c10e4140c6fe7/dcs-world-reference/latest/airbases/Nevada/Groom%20Lake.json (accessed 2026-11-01). Runway and radio callsign; this file gives no radio frequencies.
- pydcs terrain data: Nevada airports (airports.py). pydcs, an open-source Python library for building DCS World missions, whose terrain data mirrors the game's. https://github.com/pydcs/dcs/blob/5ddcc63a2dcd661e16b14f7aa43219b93044855d/dcs/terrain/nevada/airports.py (accessed 2026-11-01). Groom Lake entry: radio frequencies, TACAN and ILS, as tabled on the DCS: Nevada map page.
Wikipedia articles are secondary sources and can change; they are cited with the date they were read. FAA airport data and diagrams are official but are reissued every 28 or 56 days; each is cited with the edition read. pydcs mirrors the DCS terrain data at the commit linked.