Places
Airfields
Runways, dispersals, and the human geography of wartime flying. Each place connects to the aircraft and squadrons that passed through it.
Places
Runways, dispersals, and the human geography of wartime flying. Each place connects to the aircraft and squadrons that passed through it.
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Satellite Landing Ground · Staffordshire · England
RAF Abbots Bromley was a British military airfield in Staffordshire that operated from 1940 to 1949. It primarily served as a training base for novice pilots during World War II, using small biplanes like the Tiger Moth.
Because the site was boxed in by local roads, it couldn't be expanded for larger combat planes, so it was eventually used to store bombs toward the end of the war. After the RAF left in 1949, the land was mostly returned to farming. Today, most of the old runways are gone, though a small part of the site is still used as a private grass airstrip for light aircraft.
Today, most of the former RAF Abbots Bromley has returned to its original state as farmland. Because it was a training base with grass runways and temporary buildings, there is very little military infrastructure left to see.
The main things that remain are:
A derelict guardroom: This is the most notable original brick building still standing on the site.
An active grass airstrip: A portion of the original airfield is still used for flying. It is now a private strip at Yeatsall Farm, where small planes still land on a grass runway.
Agricultural buildings: Most of the land is now used for farming, including a large poultry farm that sits on part of the old airfield site.
Former hangar sites: While most of the "Robin" and "Blister" hangars are gone (some were demolished as recently as 10–15 years ago), the footprints or concrete bases of some structures can still be spotted in the landscape.
RAF Abbots Bromley did not have the concrete or tarmac runways typically seen at larger bomber bases. Instead, it was an all-grass airfield. The site featured three grass runways arranged in a triangular pattern to allow training aircraft to take off and land in different wind directions.
Because the airfield was boxed in by local roads, these grass strips were relatively short—roughly 600 metres (about 2,000 feet) long. This limited the airfield to small training planes like Tiger Moths, as there wasn't enough space to build the long, paved runways required for heavy bombers.
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