Four F-35 fighter jets touched down at Schiphol airport on Tuesday in the first military exercise to be carried out at the Netherlands’ biggest civilian airport.

The landings were part of Operation Avatar, a Nato-led exercise to test Schiphol’s capacity to serve as an alternative to military airbases during an emergency.

“In a crisis or in wartime we might not have access to our own airfields,” Air Commodore Robert Adang, acting commander of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, explained. “In that situation we can rotate between airfields so we can operate in the most unpredictable way possible.”

The four jets flew in to the Zwanenburgbaan just after midday, navigating between regular passenger jets, before taking off an hour later from the Buitenveldertbaan an hour and a half later.

Just after 3pm they were back again, touching down smoothly after refuelling in mid-air over the North Sea towards Denmark. A tanker and cargo plane also took part in the operation.

Lieutenant-colonel Pascal Smaal, commander of 322 Squadron based at Leeuwarden Air Base, said the two-day exercise was a valuable test of the logistics of running military operations on top of Schiphol’s regular schedule of 1,100 flights a day.

“Our aim is to work safe and above all to train without having any impact on Schiphol’s air traffic,” he said. “In that sense passengers should notice nothing.”

Deputy defence minister Gijs Tuinman, a former soldier, said the exercise was a demonstration of Agile Combat Employment: the ability of the armed forces to adapt in wartime to rapidly changing situations.

“As things heat up with the threat in Europe, we don’t want to be flying F-35s just from Volkel and Leeuwarden: we want to be able to spread out so that the Russians don’t know which airfields we’re using.

“Schiphol is the hardest place, because they have 1,100 take-offs and landings of civilian aircraft and we have to fit in while that’s all going on. Later we can roll it out to regional airports like Maastricht, Groningen, Rotterdam and Twente.”