From Civilian to Aircrew: The RAF’s Wartime Training Machine A young man joins a queue outside Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, certain he will be flying an aeroplane within weeks. He has no idea that months of tests, classrooms and troopships across the Atlantic stand between him and a cockpit, or that the RAF has...
303 Squadron: Exile, Combat and the Battle of Britain A Polish pilot breaks formation over west London without orders, dives on an unescorted German fighter formation, and sends a Messerschmitt down in flames over Kent. His own squadron has spent a month grounded, waiting for the RAF to decide its pilots can be trusted to...
The Berlin Airlift: How the RAF Helped Kept a City Alive by Air Alone A Dakota comes down through cloud thick with sleet, another aircraft already queued behind it in the corridor, and ground crews are waiting on the tarmac at Gatow with a stopwatch running before the wheels have even touched. This is what...
Hugh Dowding and the Air Defence System That Won the Battle of Britain A radar operator on the Sussex coast watches a faint trace grow on a small green screen, picks up a telephone line buried deep in the ground, and reports a bearing to a room she has never seen. Miles away at Bentley...
The Westland Lysander: The Failed RAF Aircraft That Found Its War in the Dark A single-engine aircraft drops out of moonlight over a field in occupied France, guided down onto a strip of grass marked by nothing more than three hand-lit lamps. Within three minutes an agent has climbed aboard, and the aircraft is gone...
Pink’s War: The RAF’s First Independent Air Campaign Sunrise breaks over the mountains of Waziristan on the ninth of March, 1925. Below, tribesmen who ignored a British ultimatum watch RAF biplanes climb toward their villages. For the next fifty-four days, not a single soldier will cross into their territory. The only force sent against them...
The Birth of the RAF: Why Britain Created an Air Force of Its Own Bombs fall on a London schoolroom in broad daylight, and by the end of the raid eighteen children are dead. Out of that single catastrophic afternoon comes a question nobody in Whitehall had been forced to answer before: whether Britain’s aircraft...
Welcome to The RAF Chronicle Podcast. In this opening episode, we introduce the series and set out what listeners can expect in the weeks ahead. The history of the Royal Air Force is far larger than its most famous aircraft and best-known battles. This podcast is designed to explore that wider story: the aircraft, the...