RAF Coningsby

Coningsby sits in the flat farmland of the Lincolnshire fens, between Horncastle and Boston on the edge of the East Lindsey wolds. The airfield opened on 4 November 1940 as a new bomber station for No. 5 Group, taking its place in the lattice of grass and concrete strips that were turning south Lincolnshire into one vast aerodrome. Its first resident squadrons were Nos. 106 and 97, who arrived in early 1941 with Handley Page Hampdens and the troubled twin-engined Avro Manchester respectively. Wing Commander Guy Gibson took command of 106 Squadron at Coningsby in March 1942, leading it on the May 1942 thousand-bomber raid against Cologne before being posted away the following March to form what became No. 617 Squadron at Scampton.

The station was closed for most of 1942 and 1943 while its grass strips were torn up and replaced with concrete runways heavy enough to take a loaded Lancaster. It reopened in August 1943, and within weeks the rebuilt airfield received 617 Squadron itself, transferred down from Scampton in the aftermath of the dams raid. From Coningsby, and from its satellite at Woodhall Spa a few miles to the north, the Dambusters and their neighbouring squadrons spent the rest of the war as Bomber Command’s specialist precision unit, dropping Barnes Wallis’s 12,000 lb Tallboy and 22,000 lb Grand Slam earthquake bombs on viaducts, U-boat pens, V-weapon sites and the German battleship Tirpitz in her Norwegian anchorages. By the closing months of the war Nos. 61, 83 and 619 Squadrons were also flying Lancasters from the station.

Coningsby’s post-war life kept pace with the front line. De Havilland Mosquitoes and Boeing Washingtons gave way to a brief Vulcan period in the early 1960s, and from 1968 the station became a Phantom FGR.2 base, training and operating the F-4M for nearly two decades. The Tornado F.3 arrived in 1984 and the Eurofighter Typhoon FGR.4 took its place from 2005. Since June 2007 Coningsby has held the southern Quick Reaction Alert commitment, one of the two RAF stations whose Typhoons stand armed and crewed around the clock to intercept unidentified aircraft approaching United Kingdom airspace.

The station is also home to the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, which moved here from RAF Coltishall in 1976 and still maintains its dozen airworthy veterans — the Lancaster PA474, two Hurricanes, six Spitfires, a Dakota and a pair of Chipmunks — on the same airfield from which their wartime predecessors flew.