Langley Air Force Base is a U.S. Air Force installation in Hampton, Virginia, on the Back River near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Founded during the First World War as Langley Field, a joint Army and aeronautical-research airfield named for aviation pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley, it describes itself as one of the oldest continuously active air bases in the world. Since 2010 it has formed the Air Force half of Joint Base Langley–Eustis. It hosts the headquarters of Air Combat Command and the 1st Fighter Wing, which flies the F-22 Raptor.

The base grew up alongside American aeronautical research. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics opened its first laboratory beside the airfield in 1917, and its successor, NASA Langley Research Center, still operates hangars and wind tunnels there. Air Combat Command replaced Tactical Air Command at Langley in 1992, and the wing became the first operational F-22 unit in 2005. A Langley F-22 shot down the Chinese surveillance balloon off South Carolina in February 2023.

Langley's airspace became a national-security story ten months later. On 17 nights between December 6 and 23, 2023, unidentified drones, some reported to be about 20 feet long, crossed the base and nearby Navy sites after dusk. Night training was cancelled and F-22s were moved elsewhere, and the Pentagon confirmed the incursions. Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, later said he saw video of drones over the flightline and rejected a hobbyist explanation; no operator has been publicly identified. Former Pentagon official Christopher Mellon cites the Langley incursions as proof that the government cannot explain intrusions over its own bases, while former NASA official Mike Gold said in 2026 that many such sightings were likely Chinese adversary drones. Separately, former Air Force geospatial-intelligence specialist Dylan Borland testified in 2025 that in 2012 he stood beneath a silent, roughly 100-foot triangular craft near a NASA hangar at Langley, an account no released record corroborates.

The base's significance is as a test case for air-domain awareness at home. The 2023 episode showed that a headquarters base flying stealth fighters could not quickly identify or stop small aircraft overhead, and commanders said they lacked authority to act. In October 2026, Liberation Times published Nuclear Regulatory Commission records of unresolved drone flights at the Surry nuclear plant, about 20 miles away, keeping Langley at the center of the debate over foreign surveillance and gaps in sensor coverage.