RAF Andover

RAF Andover, in Hampshire, opened in August 1917 as a Royal Flying Corps station and went on to one of the longest service lives of any British military aerodrome, remaining an RAF base until 1977. Over its career it answered to a succession of organisations, including bomber, fighter, army co-operation, maintenance and support roles, reflecting how often the RAF reshaped its peacetime and wartime structure around the station.

The aerodrome is most closely associated with the RAF Staff College, which was established there on 1 April 1922 and trained generations of senior officers before relocating to Bracknell in 1970. A number of squadrons passed through, among them No. 12 Squadron, which flew types such as the Fairey Fox, Hawker Hart and the Fairey Battle, and No. 59 Squadron with the Bristol Blenheim. During the Second World War the airfield was attacked by the Luftwaffe in August 1940 at the height of the Battle of Britain, and from early 1944 it hosted the USAAF’s 370th Fighter Group flying Lockheed P-38 Lightnings.

Andover also has a place in rotary-wing history: Britain’s first military helicopter unit formed there in early 1945, equipped with the Sikorsky R-4, and the site became home to the first European helicopter training school. After the RAF departed in 1977 the station passed to the British Army, later becoming the Marlborough Lines headquarters complex, with part of the former airfield given over to a solar farm and commercial development.