RAF Manston

RAF Manston occupies the chalk plateau of the Isle of Thanet in northeast Kent, less than five miles from the cliffs at Ramsgate and closer to occupied France than any other RAF airfield in Britain. The Admiralty took farmland here over the winter of 1915-16 for a Royal Naval Air Service training aerodrome, and the station passed to the newly formed Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918. That position on the Channel coast, which had drawn the Navy in the first place, would define everything Manston did for the next forty years.

When the Luftwaffe came in the summer of 1940 the airfield was on the front line within minutes of the German fighters taking off. No. 3 Squadron had brought its Hurricanes in on 10 September 1939, and through August 1940 Manston’s diary recorded an almost continuous stream of bomb damage as Spitfires and Hurricanes scrambled from a cratered grass field; ground crew were dispersed into the surrounding woods and houses to keep them alive. Channel Stop operations against enemy shipping ran out of Manston throughout the war.

The single feature that ties Manston most closely to Bomber Command was built in 1943: an emergency runway 9,000 feet long and 750 feet wide, one of three (with Woodbridge and Carnaby) laid down on the east coast to receive crippled aircraft that would never have made their home stations. Three lanes of concrete side by side allowed multiple aircraft to land simultaneously; Manston was also fitted with the FIDO fog-dispersal system, burning petrol along the runway edges to clear the approach. The runway remains among the widest in Europe and is still 2,748 metres long today.

After the war Manston stayed operational as a Master Diversion Airfield from 1960, kept open round the clock with its own foam-carpet crash system. Gloster Meteors of 616 Squadron had flown the first British jet operations from here in 1944-45, and the jet era continued with the USAF’s 406th Fighter-Interceptor Wing in residence from 1952 to 1958. The RAF base finally closed in 1999, the site became Kent International Airport, and after years of declining traffic the last scheduled flight left for Amsterdam on 9 April 2014 with full closure on 15 May. A Development Consent Order to reopen Manston as an airfreight hub was granted in 2020, quashed in 2021, re-approved in 2022 and survived a Court of Appeal challenge in May 2024; the current owners are targeting a 2028 restart.