Kirtland Air Force Base's beginnings stem from three private airfields of 1928 to 1939 and are similar to that of other installations choosing to adapt existing runways and hangars for military use.

In the mid-1930s, Mayor Tingley, other city officials, and TWA management began to conceive of a municipal airport, the next necessary step in confirming Albuquerque's status as a "Crossroads of the Southwest."

With the help of President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds, construction on a new airport was begun four miles west of Oxnard Field and completed in 1939, on the cusp of World War II.

Its purpose was to train air and ground crews for reconnaissance and bombing duty on Boeing B-17 "Flying Fortresses" before deployment to Clark Field in the Philippine Islands.

New construction projects began early in 1942, adding offices and housing quarters, ordnance storage, a photography lab, flightline buildings, and maintenance hangars.

On 30 June, the War Department opened the program to any man between 18 and 36 who could meet the physical and mental requirements, including civilians as well as officers and enlisted men.

[5] Perhaps one of the most important functions Kirtland Field served during World War II was as a transportation center for the needs of scientists developing the atomic bomb in Los Alamos.

The Manhattan Project personnel in Los Alamos first became aware of the value of the location of the air base during the process of converting the atomic bomb into a practical airborne weapon.

[5] From Kirtland Field, Manhattan Project scientists were flown back and forth to Wendover Army Air Base for testing in a disguised "Green Hornet" aircraft.

A special Manhattan Engineer District, Military Police unit was located at Kirtland Field to guard facilities used to load Los Alamos–assembled ordnance and test shapes on Silverplate aircraft.

[5] On 16 July 1945, at Kirtland Field, two B-29 Superfortress observation planes had set out early in the morning with instructions from Oppenheimer to steer a course at least 15 miles west of the atomic detonation point, Trinity Site.

After various other incarnations—as a convalescent center and aircraft burial ground—Sandia Base became the precursor to Sandia National Laboratories when the Manhattan Project's Z Division relocated from Los Alamos to continue top-secret work development of atomic weapons.

It was built to the south to serve as the base for testing the top-secret proximity fuze, a device that played an important role in defeat of the German Vergeltungswaffe (V-1) rocket.

By war's end, nearly 50,000 acres had been acquired for the NMPG, this acreage is to the south of the runway and main base that today makes up the greatest portion of Kirtland AFB.

Kirtland Field was returning to B-29 Superfortress activity as the flight-testing headquarters for the 58th Bombardment Wing, which had been stationed at Roswell Army Airfield, New Mexico under the Fourth Air Force.

The W-47 Project had been the wartime operation established at Wendover Army Air Base to train the 509th Composite Group to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Titled the Z Division for its chief, Dr. Jerrold Zacharias, a Los Alamos scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the new group's mission was to manage the engineering design, production, assembly, and field-testing of the non-nuclear components associated with nuclear bombs.

[5] In July and August 1946, Kirtland Field and Sandia Base personnel took part in Operation Crossroads at the Eniwetok Proving Ground in the Pacific's Marshall Islands.

[5] In early 1947, the AMC established Kirtland Field's mission as the USAAF nuclear weapons facility, a continuation of the wartime Wendover Army Air Base (509th Composite Group)–Manhattan Project operations.

The unit was composed of a flight equipped with Douglas A-26 Invader light bombers, a fighter squadron flying 25 P-51 Mustangs and three T-6 Texan trainers, plus a small weather detachment.

According to the official history of the "F Troop 58th Weather Squadron," the RB-57F proved itself to be an aircraft gifted with the capabilities of exceptional payload, high altitude, long-range performance, and extended loiter time, all of which were useful for taking air samples.

For example, in 1965, AFWL's Civil Engineering Research Branch began studies using conventional high explosives to simulate a nuclear blast to test the hardness or survivability of underground missile silos and command centers.

In January 1981 a high-energy laser beam was generated inside the ALL, directed through the APT, and propagated in the air outside the aircraft; this was the first demonstration that the ALL components could work as a unified system and point to a target.

The highlight of the ALL program occurred in May 1983, over the Naval Weapons Center Range at China Lake, California, where the laser was combined with a sophisticated pointer and tracker to negate, or disable, five AIM-9 "Sidewinder" missiles.

The F-16 Falcon fighter and the BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile were among the weapons the center tested in the 1970s, and the Kirtland Base Information Resources and Economic Impact statement of FY 1984 reported that AFTEC was then "evaluating more than 90 major systems.

That unit's helicopter and fixed wing training brought regular flight operations to Kirtland in addition to the usual support provided for transient military aircraft.

The training included classes in mountain climbing, survival, navigation, scuba-equipped parachute jumps, hoisting from a helicopter, emergency medicine, combat tactics, and weapons.

The action meant that the squadron could no longer perform its mission of safeguarding the weapons at the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex until it passed a nuclear surety inspection.

[20] Suspected to have been leaking undetected for decades, an estimated 6 to 24 million gallons of fuel saturated the soil, posing a serious hazard to wells in the south valley connected to the municipal water supply.

[25] In June 2014, the board of directors of Albuquerque's municipal water utility approved a resolution that "any amount of ethylene dibromide, no matter how small, would be cause to shut down the affected well".