Royal Air Force

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of April 1918, two rival air services stopped competing and became one. The Royal Air Force was born that day from the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, making it the second independent air force in the world. Only the Finnish Air Force, established a few weeks earlier on the 6th of March 1918, got there first. From that single date forward, the RAF would grow into something its founders could scarcely have imagined: the largest air force on earth at the moment of its birth, and one that would eventually shoot down enemy aircraft, drop bombs on entire cities, lift thousands of refugees from crisis zones, and parachute doctors onto remote islands in the South Atlantic. What drove the creation of a service that belonged to neither army nor navy? How did it survive the peacetime cuts that nearly dissolved it? And what does an air force built for propeller-driven biplanes look like more than a century later, now operating stealth fighters and surveillance satellites? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. The Smuts Report

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  The man most responsible for bringing the RAF into existence was not British. Jan Smuts, the South African statesman and general, issued the report on the 17th of August 1917 that set everything in motion. Lieutenant General David Henderson contributed significantly to that report as well. Together, their work informed the Air Force (Constitution) Bill, which Parliament passed on the 23rd of November 1917. Royal assent came six days later, on the 29th of November 1917. On the 7th of March 1918, King George V issued a royal decree naming the new service the Royal Air Force. The RAF's first headquarters were not at an airfield but at the former Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London. The logic behind a separate service was rooted in Britain's own painful experience: German bombing raids on British soil during the First World War had made the case that air power needed dedicated, unified command. The RAF was among the earliest and most enthusiastic advocates of strategic bombing as a doctrine, and that conviction, forged in the First World War, would shape British military thinking for decades. Once hostilities ended in 1918, the service was drastically cut back and handed a quieter mandate. In 1925, the RAF carried out its first independent operation, a successful air campaign against rebelling Mahsud tribesmen during what became known as Pink's War.

• 3. The Battle of Britain

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  During the summer of 1940, the RAF faced a German Luftwaffe that outnumbered it. The Battle of Britain was, in the words of historians, perhaps the most prolonged and complicated air campaign in history. What was at stake was Operation Sea Lion, Adolf Hitler's plan for a land invasion of the United Kingdom. The RAF's defence contributed significantly to that invasion's indefinite postponement. On the 20th of August 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons in a speech prompted directly by the ongoing RAF effort. He said: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Those words attached themselves permanently to the pilots of Fighter Command. The RAF's international character during the war is easy to overlook. By the war's end, the Royal Canadian Air Force had contributed more than thirty squadrons to RAF formations, and approximately a quarter of Bomber Command's personnel were Canadian. The Royal Australian Air Force represented around nine per cent of all RAF personnel in the European and Mediterranean theatres. Exiles from occupied Europe flew alongside Commonwealth crews. Under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, announced in December 1939, air forces from across the Empire trained and formed what were called Article XV squadrons for service with RAF formations. The combined Bomber Command campaign against Germany, conducted mainly at night over cities including Hamburg and Dresden, constituted the largest single RAF effort of the war. Specific precision operations, including the Dambusters raid by No. 617 Squadron and the Amiens prison raid known as Operation Jericho, sat alongside that area-bombing strategy rather than replacing it. At the RAF's peak in 1944, more than 1,100,000 personnel were serving in its ranks.

• 4. Cold War Commitments

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  Between the 26th of June 1948 and the 12th of May 1949, the RAF provided 17 per cent of all supplies delivered to blockaded Berlin during the airlift codenamed Operation Plainfire. Avro Yorks and Douglas Dakotas flew to Gatow Airport, while Short Sunderland flying boats used Lake Havel. The Cold War also brought the RAF nuclear responsibilities it had never previously held. Before Britain developed its own nuclear arsenal, the service received American weapons under Project E. On the 16th of February 1960, the British government elected to share its nuclear deterrent between the RAF's V bombers and Royal Navy submarines. Those V bombers were initially armed with nuclear gravity bombs, then later equipped with the Blue Steel missile. The strategic nuclear role passed entirely to the navy's Polaris submarines on the 30th of June 1969, reducing the RAF to a tactical nuclear role that continued, using WE.177 gravity bombs, until 1998. Away from the nuclear standoff, the RAF fought in numerous smaller conflicts. Operation Firedog, begun in June 1948, targeted Malayan pro-independence fighters over twelve years of operations from RAF Tengah and RAF Butterworth. The Suez Crisis of 1956 saw the RAF's most recent loss to an enemy aircraft: an English Electric Canberra PR7 shot down over Syria. During the Jebel Akhdar War in Oman, the RAF made 1,635 raids between July and December 1958, dropping 1,094 tons of ordnance and firing 900 rockets, yet the conflict remained deliberately low-profile. The 1982 Falklands War produced one of the Cold War period's largest RAF actions, with Flight Lieutenant Dave Morgan becoming the highest-scoring pilot of the conflict. After the British victory, the McDonnell Douglas Phantom FGR2 took up permanent air defence duties at RAF Mount Pleasant, which was built in 1984.

• 5. Post-Cold War Operations

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  Since 1990, the RAF has taken part in the Gulf War of 1991, the Kosovo War of 1999, operations in Afghanistan from 2001 and in Iraq from 2003, the 2011 intervention in Libya, and the campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 onwards. Remotely piloted aircraft joined this picture in 2004 when No. 1115 Flight began missions in Afghanistan and Iraq using the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator. In 2007 the RAF established its own dedicated RPAS squadron, No. 39 Squadron, operating MQ-9A Reapers from Creech AFB in Nevada. As part of Operation Pitting in August 2021, the RAF helped evacuate over 15,000 people in two weeks from Afghanistan, in what was described as the largest airlift since the Berlin Blockade. Between April and May 2023, Operation Polarbear helped evacuate over 2,300 people from Sudan during the conflict there. On the 9th of May 2026, a different kind of mission illustrated the RAF's reach in stark terms. A specialist team parachuted onto Tristan da Cunha, one of the world's most remote inhabited islands, to treat a British national with suspected hantavirus. Six paratroopers and two military clinicians flew 6,788 kilometres from RAF Brize Norton to Ascension Island, then more than 3,000 kilometres to the drop zone, supported by mid-air refuelling from an RAF Voyager. Medics battled winds exceeding 25 mph to land on the island's rocky golf course. Simultaneously, an RAF A400M air-dropped 3.3 tonnes of medical aid and oxygen. The territory normally operates with just a two-person medical team. In April 2024, Typhoon FGR4s flying from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus engaged and destroyed Iranian drones over Iraqi and Syrian airspace, and in 2026, during operations linked to the Iran conflict, the RAF flew its first combat use of the F-35B to shoot down drones.

• 6. Aircraft and Capabilities

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  The Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4 is the RAF's current primary combat aircraft, having taken on ground attack duties from the Panavia Tornado GR4 when that aircraft retired on the 1st of April 2019. Four Typhoons based at RAF Mount Pleasant on the Falkland Islands are named Faith, Hope, Charity, and Desperation, and they form No. 1435 Flight. The Typhoon made its combat debut during Operation Ellamy in 2011 and fired its first air-to-air kill in December 2021, destroying a small hostile drone near Al-Tanf base in Syria with an ASRAAM missile. Alongside it sits the F-35B Lightning, operated jointly with the Fleet Air Arm. No. 617 Squadron, known as the Dambusters, officially reformed on the 18th of April 2018 as the first operational RAF Lightning squadron, with the aircraft declared combat ready in January 2019. By March 2026-48 F-35Bs had been delivered, though one crashed in November 2021. At the 2025 NATO Summit at The Hague, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the RAF would acquire at least twelve nuclear-capable F-35As, marking the return of a nuclear role for the first time since 1998. The signals intelligence fleet runs three Boeing RC-135W Rivet Joints operated by No. 51 Squadron, aircraft so complex that their conversion from KC-135R tankers was described as the most intricate combined Foreign Military Sales and cooperative support arrangement the UK had undertaken with the US Air Force since the Second World War. Nine Boeing Poseidon MRA1 maritime patrol aircraft, ordered in November 2015, filled a decade-long capability gap left by the cancellation of the Nimrod MRA4. The first operational Poseidon mission took place on the 3rd of August 2020, tracking the Russian warship Vasily Bykov. Intelligence surveillance missions are flown by eight Shadow aircraft, converted King Air 350CERs, operated by No. 14 Squadron from RAF Waddington.

• 7. Ceremony and Identity

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  The RAF's motto, Per Ardua ad Astra, is usually translated as "Through Adversity to the Stars", though the service's official translation is "Through Struggle to the Stars". That motto was suggested not by a senior commander but by a junior officer named J S Yule, responding to a request for suggestions from Colonel Sykes of the Royal Flying Corps. The RAF badge was first used in August 1918 and depicts an eagle in heraldic terms. Debates have circulated over whether the original bird was meant to be an albatross or an eagle; the consensus holds it was always an eagle. The roundel on RAF aircraft traces its origins to October 1914, when the French system of three concentric rings was adopted, with the colours reversed to a red disc, white ring, and outer blue ring. During the Second World War, aircraft serving in the Far East had the red disc removed to prevent confusion with Japanese markings. The Red Arrows, officially the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, were formed in late 1964 at RAF Waddington, replacing several unofficial display teams sponsored by RAF commands. They flew sixty-five shows across Europe in their first season, initially using seven Folland Gnat trainers inherited from the RAF Yellowjacks team. The team grew to nine members in 1966, enabling their trademark Diamond Nine formation. In late 1979 they switched to the BAE Hawk trainer. The Red Arrows have since performed over 4,700 displays in fifty-six countries. The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, formed in 1957, operates Spitfires, Hurricanes, an Avro Lancaster, and a Dakota for commemorative occasions. Its aircraft appear at Trooping the Colour, Royal Weddings, and Jubilee ceremonies, keeping the machines that defined the RAF's founding decade visible to the public. The RAF celebrated its 100th anniversary on the 1st of April 2018, marking the occasion on the 10th of July 2018 with a flypast over London of 103 aircraft.