Royal Air Force station

A Royal Air Force station is a permanent Royal Air Force operations location. An RAF station houses personnel who work within the Royal Air Force to deliver its outputs as per its mission statement. Traditionally recognised for its Airpower contingent, the RAF also has many support stations, not all with airfields or runways that can accommodate aircraft. Some radar stations are designated as Remote radar heads (RRH) as they are operated from other bases with only a skeleton staff on site. Bases that the RAF have owned and operated can be labelled as airfields, relief landing grounds, satellite stations, support stations, radar bases (or latterly, remote radar heads), training establishments, seaplane bases, bombing ranges, ammunition dumps, communication bases and RAF Hospitals.

A handful of extant bases date from the First World War era, but most are from the expansion period of the RAF (the 1930s), or were built in the Second World War. Some stations were reactivated for a different purpose than what was originally intended, such as RAF Harrington, which was an airfield in the Second World War, then in the 1950s became a missile-launching site.


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