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90th Anniversary of the RAF
To celebrate the 90th Anniversary of the Royal Air Force, Poppy Travel organised a special Battlefield Tour from 31 March to 2 April.
Starting with a visit to the RAF Museum at Hendon to see the range of aircraft used over the past nine decades, participants spent an exciting evening piloting a Great War aircraft flight simulator and reliving the experience of the early fliers as they engaged in a desperate struggle to control the sky over the trenches of WW1. This was the era of the knights of the air when, for the first time in centuries, men duelled in single mortal combat.
The next morning it was off to Dover with visits to the Bleriot Memorial and Swingate Down, site of the RFC Airfield above Dover Port, where squadrons departed for the Western Front. Then across the channel to Belgium and a tour of aviation related sites in the Ypres Salient, including Abeele RAF Airfield.
Two RAF Veterans laid a wreath at the Menin Gate on the 1st April 2008, the actual 90th Anniversary. They were Tony Barker who completed his national Service in Singapore in 1953 (now living in Cheshire) and Pauline Anwyl-Jones from London, who served in the WRAF in Aden in the 1960s.
We also laid a wreath at the grave of Albert Ball VC on behalf of Mr Francis Ball, one of his relatives. Albert Ball, a Nottingham man whose pugnacious attitude, courage and daring inspired several generations of the RA, was one of Britain's most famous Air Aces.
Day three of the tour included visits to other memorials and graves, sites that played a part in the stories of the great pilots such as Hawker, Strange, Ball, McCudden, Mannock and their opponents von Richthofen, Voss, Boelcke and Immelman.
The Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Servic pioneered almost every form of military aviation during the first three-and-a-half years of World War 1 - from aerial reconnaissance over Mons in 1914 to strategic bombing and night fighting. British air power played a vital role in the eventual Allied victory.
Yet it's easy to forget that aviation technology was then in it's infancy. Just ten years before the RAF was founded, no one had even flown across the channel.
Poppy Travel plan to run a similar tour in 2009, the 95th anniversary of the RFC's first actions in 1914. Our tour in 2009 will be a Pilgrimage to the graves and memorials of the airmen of the RFC and RNAS. Look out for details over the next few months.
If you have a group interested in doing something similar at another time, call Poppy Travel on 01622 716729 or 01622 716182 to see what can be arranged. We'd love to be of assistance.