6 RAF CENTENARY CELEBRATION BOMBERS
Above
The Royal Air Force
badge was approved
by the Air Council on
August 1, 1918: the
original differing only
slightly from
today’s version.Right
De Havilland DH.
A7995 parked out
at its birthplace, the
Aircraft Manufacturing
Company’s factory and
airfi eld at Hendon in- Today, Hendon is
the headquarters of
the RAF Museum and
where the ‘RAF First
100 Years’ exhibition
will be launched in the
summer of 2018.
W
hen the Royal Air Force
was established on April 1,
1918 there were pundits
who doubted it would outlast the
Great War and then the ‘upstart’
would be put back in its place.
World events were to prove that
the RAF was not a short-lived need
but a fundamental requirement of
modern defence.
Throughout its ten decades, the
RAF has been frequently tested,
but seldom found lacking. Its Latin
motto, ‘Per Ardua ad Astra’, best
translated as ‘Through Adversity
to the Stars’, sums up its incredible
achievements.
Royal ascent was granted to an Act
of Parliament establishing the RAF
and the Air Council on November
29, 1917. Prior to that there had
been two air arms, with over-lapping
operations, the Royal Flying Corps
(RFC) and the Royal Naval Air
Service (RNAS), each competing
for resources and personnel. The
RFC, established on March 13,
1912, had a Military Wing and a
Naval Wing but from July 1914
the naval element became self-
contained as the RNAS. The AirForce Constitution Act provided for
amalgamation of the RFC and the
RNAS and set the date for this to
come into full force – April 1, 1918.
The Armistice that came into effect
on the eleventh hour of the eleventh
month in 1918 brought the horrific
‘war to end all wars’ to a close. Only
21 years later the world was again
at war; this time a conflict in which
aviation was to play a vital – not
merely supportive – role.
The peace of 1945 proved to be
transitory as a new clash developed;
the so-called Cold War that lasted
all the way to the dissolution of
the Soviet Union in 1991. Beyond
that the planet has been littered
with armed dissent: global terrorist
movements, brutal civil wars and
the birth of another new buzzword –
cyber warfare.
Countless words and images will
be published during the RAF’s
centenary celebrations and deciding
how to present a FlyPast ‘special’
that paid tribute in an original
manner took some pondering. The
team settled on telling the story of
the RAF through its bombers and
fighters in two publications. (If youmissed the magazine devoted to the
fighters you can still secure a copy.
Details of how to order it appear
elsewhere in this volume.)LINKED BY HERITAGE
Our romp through the RAF’s
bomber types starts with the de
Havilland Amiens of 1918 and
concludes with the Lockheed
Martin Lightning II which will
enter full squadron service at
Marham this year. References vary
about the extent of the US-designed
warplane’s payload, but ‘formidable’
would sum it up. Within its
weapons bays and on its wing
pylons it can likely carry twice the
all-up weight of its de Havilland
forebear of a century before.
Despite this yawning gulf of
performance and statistics, both the
Amiens and the F-35B are linked by
more than their heritage: deterrence
was and is their business. It is as
well to remember that in 1918 the
Amiens was not a slow, vulnerable
‘stick and string’ biplane, it was a
state-of-the-art weapon wielded by a
world power.
These pages show that in1918 2018AD ASTRAAD ASTRA
PER ARDUA
1918 TO 2018
AD ASTRA
PER ARDUA
1918 TO 2018