The Wiltshire Station that was the Spiritual Home of the Fat Albert
RAF LYNEHAM was a location known to most people who had worked overseas in the military prior to 2012, many having passed through its departure and arrival lounges at some point during their service life.
The home of the Hercules transporter for decades, the station located just south of the M4 in Wiltshire, halfway between Swindon and Chippenham, was where many service journeys began and ended.
The transport hub of the RAF for around 70 years, Lyneham was known as the gateway to Afghanistan during the 20-year conflict that began in 2001, many of the military personnel killed on active duty repatriated through the station.
It was 2011 that daily flying operations were ceased at the station, 72 years after work had begun at a site, the construction of the airfield and associated buildings only beginning once Lyneham Court manor house had been demolished. The Wiltshire station was part of the pre-war RAF expansion programme, work developing the site continuing after WWII began, with Lyneham officially opening on May 18, 1940 as No. 33 Maintenance Unit (MU), boasting just nine vehicles and four officers, but no aircraft.
(RAF Lyneham in 2010 - 📸 Ad Meskens)
It was the end of May, 1940, when the first two aircraft arrived – recorded as a de Havilland Tiger Moth and a Fairey Albacore – and just three months before the site came under attack by the Luftwaffe, a single aircraft dropping two high-explosive bombs and directly hitting a hangar, killing five civilian workmen. A year after opening the station’s concrete runways were completed, with a 1.8km north-south landing ground established later in 1943.
It was during the war years that Lyneham first became a transport hub, regular flights operating to Gibraltar and onwards to Malta and beyond, Consolidated Liberators and later Avro Yorks flying out – No. 246 Squadron operating troop flights to India until October 1946 when the unit was disbanded.
With the increase in air transport operations, Transport Command was formed in March 1943, Lyneham becoming part of No. 46 Group RAF and the main Transport Command airfield in the south of the country. The station was also used as a clearance airfield for a range of operations, including being one of two main sites used to transport Winston Churchill to planned diplomatic meetings around the globe.
Post-war, No. 99 Squadron reformed at the station in November 1945, operating Avro Yorks, flying into and out of the German capital during the Berlin Blockade that ran through 1948 ending in May 1949. Russian forces blocked road, rail, and canal access to Berlin in a dispute over a range of issues, beginning when western forces brought in a new currency in West Germany; Berlin was supplied with all its needs by air, an aircraft landing at Templehof Airport every minute at its peak.
No. 99 continued in the transport role through to the mid-1970s, operating a range of aircraft out of Lyneham including Handley Page Hastings and Bristol Britannias, moving Brize Norton in June 1970.
In the mid-1950s, Lyneham became one of 18 stations designated as dispersal airfields for the RAF’s V-bomber force which carried Britain’s nuclear deterrent, with a sector of the station built to allow four Avro Vulcans, or Handley Page Victors, to operate from what was effectively a self-contained base.
(To celebrate 25 years of the Hercules C-130K at Lyneham, XV292 was inscribed "Hercules 25 years in RAF service 1967-1992" and bore the heraldic badges of all the units that had operated the type, 24, 30, 36, 47, 48 and 70 Squadrons, and 242 OCU. - 📸 Harry Clampers)
It was the summer of 1967 when the first Hercules arrived at Lyneham, the early 1970s seeing the station cement its position as the primary tactical transport base for the RAF, Nos. 30, 47 and 48 Squadrons relocating to the Wiltshire site to create five tactical Hercules units at the station. By 1976, there were seven squadrons equipped with the aircraft affectionately known as the Fat Albert, with No. 70 returning to the UK from Akrotiri in Cyprus.
While the Hercules’ squadron strength was down to five by 1978 with the disbandment of Nos. 36 and 48, Lyneham’s role as the key transport hub for the RAF was undiminished, and during the Falklands conflict in 1982, its Hercules were crucial in ferrying supplies to British forces in the south Atlantic – helping create an air bridge between the UK and Wideawake on Ascension.
The 1990s saw upgrades on the facilities at Lyneham, with many of the buildings still in use dating back to WWII, and the future looked secure in the late 1990s as the station received the first of the new C-130J Hercules in November 1999, operated by Nos. XXIV and 30 Squadrons.
However, fears over the station’s future were raised soon after when the MoD announced a strategic review of future roles at Lyneham, Brize Norton and St Mawgan in Cornwall in November 2001, with reference to the future arrival of the Airbus A330 Voyager and A400M.
It was July 4, 2003, when the countdown to the closure of Lyneham began, the government announcing that transport and air-refuelling fleets would be consolidated at Brize Norton, with 2012 earmarked as a closure date for Lyneham if no wider defence use for the station could be identified.
Hopes were raised in 2006 with Lyneham believed under consideration as a helicopter station, but those proved ultimately fruitless and in May 2009 when it was decided to retain Joint Helicopter Command (JHC) in its current format, Lyneham was on borrowed time.
(Hercules flypast from RAF Lyneham to RAF Brize Norton, on July 1, 2011)
It was 2011 that saw the station’s Hercules fleet making the short trip to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, with May 31 seeing a parade with the Princess Royal in attendance as the station’s Honorary Air Commodore, marking the departure of Nos. 24, 30 and 47 Squadrons. On July 1, 2011, the last of the aircraft most closely associated with Lyneham finally departed, four Hercules conducting a flypast before making the short hop to Brize Norton.
The ensign-lowering ceremony for RAF Lyneham took place in December 2012, the site handed over to the MoD’s Defence Infrastructure Organisation; now known as MoD Lyneham, it is home to the Defence School of Electronic and Mechanical Engineering (DSEME).
