Every war the Royal Air Force has fought
The Royal Air Force has been in action almost continuously since it was formed. Where a consolidated sortie or loss figure exists in the official record it is given here; where accounts disagree, the range is shown and the disagreement named. Blank cells are blank because no figure could be verified, not because the fighting was small.
From the Western Front in 1918 to the Middle East today.
| Conflict | Years | Against | Main aircraft | Sorties | Aircraft lost | |
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| The First World Warthe Independent Force and the last seven monthsRoyal Air Force | 1918 | German Empire, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Empire | Sopwith Camel, Sopwith Snipe, Sopwith Dolphinand 5 more | — | — | |
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Inherited the air war on 1 April 1918 from the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, and fought the last seven months of it in every theatre, including the first sustained strategic bombing campaign against German industrial cities. The RAF was created in the middle of a war, on 1 April 1918, and its first act was to keep fighting. The immediate cause of its creation was the Gotha and Giant bomber raids on London in 1917, which had shown that air attack on a country’s cities was now possible and that no single authority in Britain was responsible for stopping it or for doing the same in reverse. Jan Smuts’s report recommended a separate air service and a separate air ministry; the Air Council was formed in January 1918 and Hugh Trenchard became the first Chief of the Air Staff on 18 January. In June the Independent Force was created under Trenchard to bomb German industrial and rail targets in the Rhineland and the Saar, the first organisation in history whose purpose was strategic bombing. The argument the Independent Force started — whether bombing an enemy’s industry and population can decide a war by itself — runs straight through the next century of the RAF. Outcome The Armistice of 11 November 1918. The RAF ended the war as the largest air force in the world and was then cut to a fraction of its size within two years. Figures for the RAF’s own losses between 1 April and 11 November 1918 are not separated from those of its predecessor services in the accessible published record.
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| Air control and imperial policingIraq, Aden and the North-West FrontierRoyal Air Force | 1919–1939 | Tribal and nationalist forces in Iraq, Aden, Somaliland and the North-West Frontier | Airco DH.9A, Bristol F.2 Fighter, Vickers Vernonand 2 more | — | — | |
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Policed British mandated and colonial territory from the air, taking over from ground garrisons. From 1 October 1922 an RAF officer commanded all British military forces in Iraq, the first time in history that an airman directed all military operations in a country. Air control was how Trenchard kept the RAF alive. The Admiralty and the War Office both wanted their aviation back after 1918, and the argument that won was cost: an air force could police an empire more cheaply than garrisons could. At the Cairo Conference of March 1921, chaired by Winston Churchill, Trenchard proposed that the RAF take over military command in Iraq; it did so on 1 October 1922 with eight squadrons and locally recruited levies. The method was to bomb villages whose people had not paid taxes or had sheltered fighters. The RAF’s own Air Power Review has examined it without flinching: the targeting held whole communities responsible for individual acts, the accuracy was poor — in one operation in November 1928, 102 of 182 bombs missed — and the psychological effect faded as people learned to disperse, camouflage and warn each other. The 1920 Iraqi revolt that preceded it had cost 1,040 British dead and missing, about 8,450 rebel deaths and some 40 million pounds; the appeal of doing it by aeroplane instead was financial before it was anything else. Outcome The RAF survived as an independent service, which was the object. Air control was abandoned as a method after 1945 and has been reassessed critically by the RAF itself. Civilian casualties from air control operations were not systematically recorded at the time and no reliable total exists.
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| The Battle of Francethe Advanced Air Striking ForceRoyal Air Force | 1939–1940 | Germany | Fairey Battle, Bristol Blenheim, Hawker Hurricaneand 2 more | — | — | |
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Fought the air campaign over France and the Low Countries with an expeditionary force of bombers and fighters, and covered the evacuation from Dunkirk. The Advanced Air Striking Force went to France in September 1939 with squadrons of Fairey Battles, an aircraft that was obsolete before it fired a shot. When the German offensive began on 10 May 1940 the Battle squadrons were sent against the Meuse bridges in daylight and were destroyed; the RAF’s first two Victoria Crosses of the war were awarded posthumously for one such attack at Veldwezelt on 12 May. Over Dunkirk, Fighter Command flew patrols out of range of the beaches for much of the time, which is why soldiers on the sand believed the RAF was absent. The decisive event of the campaign for the RAF was negative: Hugh Dowding’s refusal, in writing to the Cabinet on 16 May 1940, to send more Hurricane squadrons to a battle he judged already lost. Fighter Command survived because of it. Outcome Defeat. The British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk and Dowding refused to send more fighter squadrons to France, a decision that preserved Fighter Command for the summer. Loss figures for the campaign vary substantially between accounts and none is quoted here.
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| The Battle of Britainthe Dowding SystemRoyal Air Force | 1940 | Germany and Italy | Hawker Hurricane, Supermarine Spitfire, Boulton Paul Defiantand 2 more | — | — | |
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Defended the United Kingdom against the Luftwaffe’s attempt to win air superiority as a precondition for invasion, using the world’s first integrated air defence system. The Spitfire gets the credit and the Dowding System won the battle. Chain Home and Chain Home Low radar detected raids forming over France; the Observer Corps, 30,000 strong, tracked them once they crossed the coast; filter rooms at Bentley Priory resolved the plots; and group and sector operations rooms turned them into interception orders over the telephone. The RAF reckoned about twenty minutes from detection to a German aircraft reaching its target, four minutes to decide and sixteen to scramble and climb. No other country had anything comparable, and it is the reason a numerically inferior force could concentrate where it mattered. The RAF counts 2,945 aircrew as having flown in the battle; the Battle of Britain London Monument’s roll of clasp holders gives 2,937, and the small difference between the two is a matter of how marginal cases are counted. Roughly one in five were not British: 145 Poles, 127 New Zealanders, 112 Canadians, 88 Czechoslovaks, 32 Australians, 28 Belgians, 25 South Africans, 13 French, 10 Irish, 9 Americans and single figures from Rhodesia, Barbados, Jamaica and Newfoundland. No. 303 (Polish) Squadron was among the highest-scoring units in the battle. Both sides overclaimed victories by wide margins and the corrected figures are published; the contemporary scoreboards should not be repeated. Dowding was removed from Fighter Command in November 1940 and Keith Park from No. 11 Group in December, after the dispute with Trafford Leigh-Mallory and Douglas Bader over whether fighters should be committed singly and quickly or massed into a Big Wing that took too long to form. Outcome The Luftwaffe failed to gain air superiority, Operation Sealion was postponed indefinitely on 17 September 1940 and then abandoned. It was the first defeat Germany suffered in the war. In Afterburner The Hardest Day: 18 August 1940 Cost More Than Battle of Britain Day Victory claims made at the time by both air forces were greatly inflated and are not used here.
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| The strategic bombing offensiveBomber CommandRoyal Air Force | 1939–1945 | Germany and Italy | Avro Lancaster, Handley Page Halifax, Short Stirlingand 5 more | 501,536 | 8,325 | |
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Flew the British strategic bombing campaign against German industry, transport and cities, and from 1944 against the invasion’s transport targets and the V-weapon sites. Bomber Command is the hardest thing on this page to write honestly, and there is no version of it that flatters everybody. The command began the war unable to find a German city at night, let alone hit a factory in one; the Butt Report of August 1941 found that only a third of crews claiming to attack got within five miles of the target. The area bombing directive of 14 February 1942 followed, and Arthur Harris took over eight days later. What followed was the destruction of German cities: the Battle of the Ruhr, Hamburg in July 1943 where a firestorm killed tens of thousands in one night, the long and costly Battle of Berlin, and Dresden on 13 to 15 February 1945. Bomber Command also mined German waters, destroyed the Ruhr dams in May 1943, sank the Tirpitz, broke the V-weapon sites and, from spring 1944, wrecked the French rail network before D-Day. The cost to its own men has no parallel in the British forces: 55,573 killed out of 125,000, a worse chance of survival than a subaltern had on the Somme, borne by volunteers in their late teens and early twenties. They received no campaign medal at all until the Bomber Command Clasp was announced in December 2012, and no memorial until the one in Green Park was unveiled on 28 June 2012, sixty-seven years after the war ended. The International Bomber Command Centre at Lincoln, opened in 2018, lists 57,861 names. Outcome German war production was dispersed and disrupted, the Luftwaffe was drawn into defending the homeland, and hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Whether the campaign was proportionate or decisive is still argued. In Afterburner RAF Pathfinders: The Squadrons That Lit the Target German civilian deaths from Allied bombing are estimated in a wide range and no figure is asserted here. The argument about the morality and the military value of area bombing is reported, not resolved.
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| The Mediterranean and North AfricaMalta and the Desert Air ForceRoyal Air Force | 1940–1945 | Italy, Germany and Vichy France | Hawker Hurricane, Supermarine Spitfire, Curtiss Tomahawk and Kittyhawkand 4 more | — | — | |
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Defended Malta through a three-year siege, and developed with the Eighth Army the close air support methods that became the model for Allied tactical air power in Europe. The island of Malta was bombed more heavily than anywhere else in Europe and was defended at first by a handful of Gloster Gladiators and then by Hurricanes and Spitfires flown off aircraft carriers. The island was awarded the George Cross in April 1942. In the Western Desert the RAF and the Eighth Army worked out, largely by trial and error, how an air force and an army should actually talk to each other: forward air controllers, a common command post, an air commander of equal rank to the land commander, and the ability to switch the whole air effort from one part of the front to another in hours. Arthur Coningham’s Desert Air Force turned that into doctrine, and it is what made the tactical air forces over Normandy work. Outcome Malta held, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered in May 1943, and the tactical air control system developed in the desert was exported to the invasion of Europe. No consolidated loss or sortie figures are quoted.
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| Burma and the Far Eastthe forgotten air warRoyal Air Force | 1941–1945 | Japan | Hawker Hurricane, Supermarine Spitfire, Bristol Blenheimand 3 more | — | — | |
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Fought a losing campaign in Malaya and Burma in 1941 and 1942, then rebuilt and supplied the Fourteenth Army entirely by air during the reconquest of Burma. The RAF in the Far East began the war with obsolete aircraft and lost Malaya and Singapore in ten weeks. What followed was a rebuild under Air Chief Marshal Richard Peirse and then Keith Park — the same Park who had run No. 11 Group in 1940 and been moved out of it. The decisive contribution was transport: at Imphal and Kohima in 1944 and throughout the advance into Burma, the Fourteenth Army was supplied almost entirely by air, which freed it from the road network that had defeated every previous force in that country. It is the least remembered of the RAF’s campaigns and among the most operationally instructive. Outcome Japanese forces in Burma were defeated in 1945. The campaign established air supply of ground forces as a war-winning technique. No consolidated loss or sortie figures are quoted.
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| The Berlin AirliftOperation PlainfareRoyal Air Force | 1948–1949 | Soviet Union | Douglas Dakota, Avro York, Short Sunderlandand 1 more | — | — | |
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Flew a quarter of the supplies that kept West Berlin alive through a Soviet blockade lasting almost eleven months, including coal, food and industrial materials. When the Soviet Union closed the land routes into Berlin in June 1948 the choice was to fight, to leave, or to fly the city its food and fuel. The RAF’s Operation Plainfare and the American Operation Vittles together landed an aircraft in Berlin every ninety seconds at the peak. The RAF delivered nearly 400,000 tons, about a quarter of the Allied total, and flew more than 130,000 people out — children, the elderly and the sick. Sunderland flying boats landed on the Havel until it froze. The York, an adapted Lancaster, did most of the coal. It remains the largest humanitarian air operation the RAF has ever mounted and the clearest demonstration that transport aircraft are a strategic weapon. Outcome The Soviet Union lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949. The airlift was the first Western victory of the Cold War and was won entirely by transport aircraft. The RAF’s own account gives tonnage and mission rates but no sortie total or casualty figure.
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| The Malayan EmergencyOperation FiredogRoyal Air Force | 1948–1960 | Malayan National Liberation Army | Bristol Beaufighter, de Havilland Vampire, de Havilland Venomand 4 more | — | — | |
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Flew twelve years of strike, transport, supply-dropping, leaflet and reconnaissance operations in support of a counter-insurgency campaign in dense jungle. Firedog is the RAF’s longest continuous operation and among its least known. Air power in Malaya did comparatively little damage by bombing jungle, which was largely a waste of ordnance, and a great deal by moving people: helicopters, which entered British service in this campaign, lifted patrols and casualties in and out of country that took days to cross on foot, and transport aircraft supplied forts and police posts. The campaign is also where the RAF learned that in counter-insurgency the transport and the reconnaissance matter more than the strike. Outcome The insurgency was defeated and Malaya became independent in 1957. The emergency was formally ended in 1960. No consolidated RAF sortie or loss figures are quoted.
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| The Korean WarSunderlands and exchange pilotsRoyal Air Force | 1950–1953 | North Korea, China and Soviet Union | Short Sunderland, Gloster Meteor | — | — | |
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Flew maritime patrol with Sunderland flying boats from Japan, provided transport support, and attached individual pilots to American and Commonwealth squadrons on exchange. Britain’s air contribution to Korea was small: Sunderland flying boats of the Far East Flying Boat Wing on maritime patrol, and RAF pilots flying on exchange with the United States Air Force and with Australian and South African squadrons. The consequence at home was large. The MiG-15 was better than anything the RAF had, and the stopgap was to take Canadian-built F-86 Sabres under the Mutual Defense Assistance Programme for the squadrons in Germany until the Hunter arrived in 1954. It was the first time since 1918 that Britain had been forced to buy a front-line fighter from abroad. Outcome Armistice on 27 July 1953. For the RAF the lasting effect was the shock of the MiG-15, which no British fighter in service could match. No RAF-specific sortie or loss figures are quoted.
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| The Suez CrisisOperation MusketeerRoyal Air Force | 1956 | Egypt | English Electric Canberra, Vickers Valiant, de Havilland Venomand 3 more | — | — | |
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Destroyed the Egyptian Air Force largely on the ground in the opening days of the Anglo-French intervention, and dropped the parachute force on Gamil airfield at Port Said. Musketeer was the last old-fashioned British air campaign: Canberras and Valiants bombing airfields from Malta and Cyprus, Venoms and Hunters strafing, and a parachute drop on Gamil airfield on 5 November. The Egyptian Air Force was effectively destroyed in two days. None of it mattered. The operation was launched on a pretext agreed in secret with France and Israel, the United States refused to support the currency, and Britain stopped. For the RAF the lesson was logistical as much as political: Cyprus and Malta were not big enough to base the force, tanker support barely existed, and the transport fleet could not lift what was needed. Much of the Transport Command build-up of the 1960s follows from it. Outcome Militarily successful and politically catastrophic. American and Soviet pressure forced a ceasefire on 6 November 1956 and a withdrawal, and the episode ended Anthony Eden’s premiership and marked the end of Britain as an independent great power. Sortie and loss figures for the RAF at Suez are given inconsistently across accounts and none is quoted here.
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| Aden, the Radfan and Borneothe last colonial air campaignsRoyal Air Force | 1962–1967 | Tribal forces in the Radfan, National Liberation Front and Indonesia | Hawker Hunter, Blackburn Beverley, Armstrong Whitworth Argosyand 3 more | — | — | |
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Flew ground attack, transport, supply-dropping and helicopter assault in two simultaneous campaigns, one against tribal insurgency in southern Arabia and one against Indonesian incursion into Borneo. These were the last campaigns of the old kind, and they were flown largely by Hunters and transport aircraft. In the Radfan the Hunter did the strike work in mountains where nothing else could reach; in Borneo the campaign was won by helicopters and short take-off transports supplying jungle forts along a 900-mile frontier. Aden is also where the RAF’s imperial role ended: the withdrawal in November 1967 closed a chain of bases that ran from Cyprus to Singapore, and the 1968 decision to leave east of Suez finished the job. Outcome Confrontation with Indonesia ended in August 1966 in British and Malaysian favour. Aden was abandoned in November 1967 and the base there, on which much British Middle East strategy had rested, was lost. No consolidated sortie or loss figures are quoted.
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| The Falklands WarOperation Corporate and the Black Buck raidsRoyal Air Force | 1982 | Argentina | Avro Vulcan B2, Handley Page Victor K2, Hawker Siddeley Harrier GR3and 2 more | — | — | |
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Flew the Black Buck bombing missions from Ascension, provided the entire tanker and long-range transport effort, put Harrier GR3s ashore from the carriers for close air support, and flew maritime patrol with Nimrods. Black Buck was the longest-range bombing operation anyone had flown. A single Vulcan flew almost 6,600 nautical miles from Ascension to Port Stanley and back, sixteen hours, supported by a chain of up to eleven Victor tankers refuelling each other to get one bomber to the target. On the first mission, on 1 May 1982, twenty-one thousand-pound bombs were dropped across the runway and one struck the centre of it. Flight Lieutenant Martin Withers in XM607 received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Squadron Leader Bob Tuxford, who flew the last Victor in the chain and gave away fuel he needed to get home, the Air Force Cross. The physical damage was modest and the strategic effect was not: Argentine fast jets could not use Port Stanley, and Mirage IIIs were pulled back to defend the mainland, which left the airspace over the islands easier for the Sea Harriers. The RAF’s larger contribution was the air bridge to Ascension, which is what made the whole campaign possible, and No. 1 Squadron’s Harrier GR3s flying close air support from HMS Hermes. Outcome Argentine surrender on 14 June 1982. The RAF has maintained a permanent presence in the Falklands ever since, now at RAF Mount Pleasant. Accounts of the effect of the Black Buck raids vary widely, from decisive to symbolic. The RAF’s own assessment is given here.
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| The Gulf WarOperation Granby and Desert StormRoyal Air Force | 1990–1991 | Iraq | Panavia Tornado GR1, Panavia Tornado F3, SEPECAT Jaguar GR1and 5 more | 6,108 | 6 | |
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Led the coalition’s attack on Iraqi airfields with low-level Tornado GR1s carrying JP233 runway denial weapons, then switched to medium-level laser-guided bombing, and flew air defence, reconnaissance, tanking and transport. The RAF sent 157 aircraft to the Gulf, including 49 Tornado GR1s, 18 Tornado F3s and 12 Jaguars, and flew 6,108 sorties during Desert Storm. The opening days were the most costly in the RAF’s post-war history. The Tornado force had trained for twenty years to attack Warsaw Pact airfields at fifty feet, and that is what it did to Iraqi airfields, delivering JP233 runway-cratering weapons from very low level into intense anti-aircraft fire. Six GR1s were lost in action. Within two weeks the campaign shifted to medium-level attack with Paveway laser-guided bombs, designated at first by elderly Buccaneers brought out for the purpose and later by Tornados with their own pods. The lesson the RAF took from it was that low-level penetration was finished, and the whole of its subsequent equipment programme — precision weapons, targeting pods, stand-off missiles — follows from those two weeks. Outcome Kuwait was liberated by 28 February 1991. The RAF deployed about 6,000 people and 157 aircraft, its largest combat deployment since Suez. Loss totals for the RAF in the Gulf differ between accounts depending on whether non-combat accidents and pre-war losses are included.
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| The Iraqi no-fly zonesOperations Jural, Warden, Bolton and ResinateRoyal Air Force | 1991–2003 | Iraq | Panavia Tornado GR1, SEPECAT Jaguar GR1, Panavia Tornado F3and 3 more | — | — | |
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Policed the northern and southern no-fly zones for twelve years, flying armed reconnaissance and responding to Iraqi air defence engagements, and took part in Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. For twelve years RAF crews flew armed patrols over a country Britain was not at war with, were shot at routinely, and shot back at air defence sites. It was normal life for a generation of Tornado and Jaguar aircrew: detachments to Incirlik in Turkey, to Dhahran and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and to Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, in rotation, for over a decade. Operation Bolton in 1997 and 1998 built up for the UNSCOM crisis and led to Operation Desert Fox, a four-day strike campaign in December 1998. The tanker effort alone was enormous and almost invisible. The legal basis for the zones was contested throughout and never tested. Outcome The zones ended with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. They were the longest continuous air operation in RAF history at that point and are almost entirely forgotten. Sortie totals for the whole twelve years are not published as a single figure.
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| BosniaOperations Deny Flight and Deliberate ForceRoyal Air Force | 1993–1995 | Army of Republika Srpska | SEPECAT Jaguar GR1, Panavia Tornado GR1, British Aerospace Harrier GR7and 3 more | — | — | |
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Enforced the no-fly zone over Bosnia, provided close air support to United Nations forces on the ground, and took part in the NATO air campaign that ended the war. Bosnia was the first NATO shooting war and the first time RAF aircraft operated continuously under United Nations and then NATO command in Europe since 1945. The frustration of the Deny Flight years — rules of engagement that required United Nations political clearance before anything could be attacked, and the humiliation of the safe areas — shaped British thinking about the use of air power under coalition command for a decade afterwards. Deliberate Force, when it finally came, was short and effective and demonstrated what precision air power could do against an army dependent on roads and artillery. Outcome Operation Deliberate Force in August and September 1995 brought the Bosnian Serb leadership to the Dayton negotiations and ended the war. No consolidated RAF sortie or loss figures are quoted.
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| KosovoOperation Allied ForceRoyal Air Force | 1999 | Federal Republic of Yugoslavia | Panavia Tornado GR1, British Aerospace Harrier GR7, Boeing E-3D Sentryand 2 more | — | 0 | |
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Flew strike missions in NATO’s 78-day air campaign against Serbian forces and infrastructure, from Italy and from the United Kingdom. Allied Force was a 78-day campaign fought at medium level, in poor weather, against an opponent who dispersed and camouflaged his army with considerable skill. The RAF’s Harrier GR7s flew from Gioia del Colle in Italy and Tornado GR1s initially all the way from Bruggen in Germany. The campaign exposed how little all-weather precision capability the RAF actually had: laser-guided bombs need the target to be visible, and for much of the campaign it was not. Enhanced Paveway, a GPS-aided weapon, was rushed into service as a result and used for the first time in this campaign. Outcome Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo in June 1999. It was the first campaign in history in which air power alone achieved the political objective, and the argument about whether that is the right reading of it began immediately. Assessments of how much Serbian armour was actually destroyed varied greatly after the campaign and are not asserted here.
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| AfghanistanOperations Veritas and HerrickRoyal Air Force | 2001–2014 | Taliban and al-Qaeda | British Aerospace Harrier GR7 and GR9, Panavia Tornado GR4, Hawker Siddeley Nimrod MR2and 5 more | — | — | |
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Flew close air support for British and coalition ground forces, tactical and strategic air transport, aeromedical evacuation, and intelligence and reconnaissance including the RAF’s first armed remotely piloted aircraft. Afghanistan changed the shape of the RAF more than any campaign since the Gulf War. Reaper, Shadow and Sentinel were all urgent operational requirements bought for this war and all became core equipment; Chinook crews flew the Immediate Response Team medical missions into contact that are among the most respected flying anyone in the service did in that period. It also produced the RAF’s worst single loss and its worst institutional reckoning. Nimrod XV230 exploded near Kandahar on 2 September 2006 after fuel escaped during air-to-air refuelling and reached a hot air duct. Charles Haddon-Cave’s review, published on 28 October 2009, found the aircraft’s safety case "a lamentable job from start to finish", criticised ten named individuals across the Ministry of Defence, BAE Systems and QinetiQ, and said the department had sacrificed safety to cost between 1998 and 2006. British military airworthiness regulation was rebuilt around its findings. Outcome British combat operations ended in 2014. The Reaper and Shadow forces that began in Afghanistan became permanent RAF capabilities. No consolidated total of RAF aircraft or personnel lost over the whole campaign is quoted.
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| The invasion of IraqOperation TelicRoyal Air Force | 2003–2011 | Iraq | Panavia Tornado GR4, British Aerospace Harrier GR7, Panavia Tornado F3and 7 more | — | 1 | |
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Deployed more than 120 fixed-wing aircraft for the invasion, flew offensive support, reconnaissance and counter-theatre ballistic missile operations, then supported the occupation for eight years. The RAF put more than 120 fixed-wing aircraft into the theatre for Telic, based at Ali Al Salem and Al Jaber in Kuwait, Al Udeid in Qatar, Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, Akrotiri in Cyprus, Muharraq in Bahrain and Seeb in Oman. Weapons included Paveway II and Enhanced Paveway II, Storm Shadow in its combat debut, ALARM anti-radiation missiles, Maverick and RBL755 cluster bombs. A substantial Harrier effort was assigned to counter-theatre ballistic missile work in western Iraq, hunting some 6,000 possible Scud hide sites. The RAF’s only aircraft loss of the invasion was to friendly fire: a Patriot battery shot down a returning Tornado on 22 March 2003 and killed both crew. Outcome The Iraqi regime fell in April 2003. British forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, having spent eight years in a counter-insurgency nobody had planned for. The Air Historical Branch narrative covers the invasion phase in detail; the eight years of occupation that followed are far less well documented in the public record.
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| LibyaOperations Ellamy and Unified ProtectorRoyal Air Force | 2011 | Libyan Arab Jamahiriya | Panavia Tornado GR4, Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4, Raytheon Sentinel R1and 4 more | 3,000 | 0 | |
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Enforced the no-fly zone and struck Libyan government forces and command targets for seven months under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, flying some missions all the way from Norfolk. The Air Historical Branch account gives the numbers plainly. The RAF flew about 3,000 sorties and struck 640 targets in seven months with 945 people in theatre at the peak. Tornado GR4s flew nearly 1,500 sorties and 7,700 hours, releasing about 900 Paveway IVs and firing Storm Shadow and Brimstone; the RAPTOR reconnaissance pod produced 48,000 points of interest. The Typhoon made its combat debut, flying 578 sorties and 3,000 hours and dropping 234 Enhanced Paveway IIs — the first time the type had dropped a bomb. Sentinel flew 204 sorties, the E-3D 225, and three VC10s flew 422 tanker sorties and gave away nearly ten million kilogrammes of fuel. The first strikes were flown by Tornados from RAF Marham, a round trip of some 3,000 miles, before the force moved to Gioia del Colle. Ellamy also exposed how thin the RAF had become: the campaign ran at the edge of what the tanker and reconnaissance fleets could sustain, and the Nimrod R1, due to retire, was kept flying to cover it. Outcome The Gaddafi government fell in October 2011. What followed in Libya is the reason the campaign is now argued about as a strategic failure despite being a clean operational success. Coalition and RAF sortie totals in different accounts count strike, support and combat air patrol sorties differently.
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| The campaign against DaeshOperation ShaderRoyal Air Force | 2014–2025 | Islamic State | Panavia Tornado GR4, Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4, General Atomics Reaper MQ-9Aand 4 more | — | 0 | |
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Flew armed reconnaissance and precision strike against Islamic State for more than a decade, with Typhoons, Tornados and Reapers, alongside intelligence, tanker and transport support. Shader ran for more than a decade from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and was the longest continuous air operation in the RAF’s modern history. British aircraft struck roughly 1,400 targets in more than 10,000 sorties. It was the Typhoon’s first sustained ground-attack campaign and the Tornado’s last, and it kept the Reaper flying for a decade past its planned retirement. Parliament voted for strikes in Iraq in September 2014 and extended them to Syria in December 2015 — the first time the Commons had approved British military action in Syria after refusing it in 2013. The civilian casualty record is contested: the Ministry of Defence maintained for years that it had caused no civilian deaths in the campaign, a claim that non-governmental monitors disputed throughout. Outcome The territorial caliphate was destroyed by 2019. The Global Coalition’s military mission in Iraq was wound down from September 2024, with the Iraq phase ending by September 2025. The Ministry of Defence’s civilian casualty figures for Shader are disputed by independent monitoring organisations and are not asserted here.
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| The 2026 Iran warBritish defensive air operationsRoyal Air Force | 2026 | Iran | Lockheed Martin Lightning F-35B, Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4, Airbus Voyager KC3 | — | 0 | |
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Flew defensive counter-air operations, shooting down Iranian one-way attack drones over Jordan, Iraq and Qatar, and defended RAF Akrotiri, which was itself struck. Britain moved F-35s to Cyprus in January 2026 and Typhoons to Qatar as the crisis built. On 28 February the Prime Minister said British aircraft were airborne on a defensive operation to protect British people, interests and allies. On 2 March RAF F-35s shot down Iranian Shahed drones over Jordan with ASRAAM, a Typhoon of No. 12 Squadron downed a drone heading for Qatar, and RAF jets intercepted others in Iraqi airspace. The night before, an Iranian-made Shahed-type drone had struck RAF Akrotiri, causing minor damage and no casualties; the British assessment was that it had not been launched from Iran. The government separately authorised American use of British bases, which was the subject of considerable argument in Parliament and outside it. No British operation name for the air defence effort was found in the public record. Outcome A ceasefire in April 2026. The British government maintained throughout that it was conducting defensive operations only and would not join offensive action against Iran. No United Kingdom operation name for these air defence missions was found; sortie and engagement totals have not been published. The account here rests on contemporaneous reporting rather than an official narrative.
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Nothing matches that search.
Every figure, checked
- Royal Air Force: The Battle of Britainthe RAF’s own figures: 2,945 aircrew, 544 killed, 312 ground personnel, and the Dowding System timings
- Battle of Britain London Monument: The Airmenthe clasp roll: 2,937 airmen and the breakdown by nationality
- Imperial War Museums: The Battle of Britainthe Observer Corps, anti-aircraft and barrage balloon figures and the phases of the battle
- Imperial War Museums: Life and death in Bomber Commandthe survival odds: 51 per cent killed on operations, 12 per cent in accidents, 13 per cent prisoners, 24 per cent unharmed
- Royal Air Force: The RAF’s vital role in the Berlin Airliftaround 400 RAF missions a day, nearly 400,000 tons delivered and more than 130,000 people evacuated
- Royal Air Force: 40th anniversary of Op Black Buckseven missions planned and five completed, almost 6,600 nautical miles, up to eleven Victor tankers, and the decorations
- RAF Centre for Air and Space Power Studies, Air Power Review: Reassessing the History of Air Controlthe RAF’s own critical assessment of air control, the Cairo Conference, the assumption of command in Iraq on 1 October 1922, and the 1928 accuracy figures
- RAF Museum: British military aviation timeline, 1918the Air Council, Trenchard’s appointment on 18 January 1918, and the No. 44 Squadron Gotha interception of 28 January
- RAF Museum: British military aviation timeline, 1956the year of Suez and of the atomic trials air task force; consulted for dating
- Royal Air Force Air Historical Branch: post-Cold War studiesthe index of published Air Historical Branch narratives, including the Operation Herrick IV study on Afghanistan
- Air Historical Branch: The RAF and the First Gulf War — Air Power Lessons157 aircraft deployed including 49 Tornado GR1s, 18 Tornado F3s and 12 Jaguars, 6,108 sorties in Desert Storm, and the opening airfield losses
- Air Historical Branch: UK Air Power in Operation Unified Protector, Libya, 2011about 3,000 RAF sorties of 26,320, 2,100 strike sorties of 9,658, 640 targets, and the type-by-type sortie and weapon figures
- Air Historical Branch: The RAF in Operation Telic, 2003 — Offensive Air Powermore than 120 fixed-wing aircraft, wing-by-wing sortie figures, and the loss of a No. IX (Bomber) Squadron Tornado to a Patriot battery on 22 March 2003
- Air Historical Branch: The RAF over Iraq and Kosovo, 1997–2000Operation Bolton, the no-fly zone sortie and tanker figures, and Desert Fox
- Royal Air Force: Operation Shaderthe RAF’s own summary of the campaign against Daesh from 2014
- Forces News: Operation Shader — UK mission to defeat IS in Iraq and Syria to come to an end28 September 2024: about 1,400 targets struck in more than 10,000 RAF sorties, and the coalition wind-down timetable
- The Royal Air Force Chronicle: Panavia Tornado GR1 in RAF Gulf War Operations, 1991six Tornado GR1s lost in the early low-level phase, and roughly 1,500 Tornado operational sorties
Figures verified 2026-09-24. Back to the Royal Air Force.