Admiralty surveyors walked the fields outside Helston in 1942. The airfield that John Laing & Son built there was commissioned in 1947 as HMS Seahawk, planned as a Naval Fighting School and, according to Wikipedia, designed as a wartime airfield to last about ten years. It never closed. On 7 July 1952 849 Naval Air Squadron was re-established at Culdrose to fly American-built Skyraider AEW1 early-warning aircraft, and the station soon added other roles.

Over the following decades Culdrose changed from a fixed-wing station into a helicopter base specialising in anti-submarine warfare, the role it still has. In 1958 Helston gave HMS Seahawk the Freedom of the Borough, and the station still parades through the town. From 1968 Culdrose was one of the designated locations in plan PYTHON, the scheme for keeping the government running after a nuclear attack, a measure of how important the station had become to the state.

In September 1974 771 Naval Air Squadron moved its search and rescue Wessexes from Portland to Culdrose. Five years later came the worst night in its history. In August 1979 a storm caught the 303 yachts of the Fastnet race; 21 people died, 15 of them competitors. The Royal Navy put up 15 helicopters from Culdrose and Prestwick: Sea Kings flew 25 sorties, Wessexes 27 and Lynxes 10. The Navy rescued 136 people in what Wikipedia calls the largest peacetime rescue operation. In the 1985 Fastnet race a Culdrose rescue diver won the George Medal for saving Simon Le Bon and 19 others.

The Sea King HAR5 replaced the Wessex from October 1987 and gave the squadron long-range, all-weather rescue. On 16 August 2004 Culdrose was one of four bases whose seven Sea Kings and a coastguard helicopter lifted about 150 people from trees, roofs and cars in the Boscastle flood, in which no one died. The squadron is credited with more than 9,000 missions and more than 15,000 lives saved. It handed rescue duty to civil contractors on 1 January 2016 and was decommissioned on 22 March 2016.

After the Falklands showed the cost of fighting without airborne early warning, 849 Squadron reformed at Culdrose in November 1984 on radar-carrying Sea Kings. They flew over Iraq in 2003, where two of the squadron’s aircraft from HMS Ark Royal collided in poor visibility, killing six British and one American aircrew. The squadron was decommissioned on 21 April 2020.

The Merlin arrived in the Navy’s anti-submarine squadrons in 2000; the first fully operational aircraft was delivered on 17 May 1997 and the type entered service on 2 June 2000. All the squadrons (814, 820, 824 and the later-merged 829) have been at Culdrose since. Thirty were upgraded to HM2 in a £750 million programme finished in July 2016. The Crowsnest radar version replaced the Sea King in the early-warning role: the first entered service in March 2021, in time for HMS Queen Elizabeth’s first deployment, and the system reached initial operating capability in July 2023 with five aircraft.

Culdrose trains much of the Navy’s aviation workforce. The Royal Naval School of Flight Deck Operations teaches aircraft handlers and firefighters on the Dummy Deck, a full-size replica of an Invincible-class carrier deck; 750 Squadron trains observers in Avenger T1s. From 7 June 2013 to 2022 the station also flew jets: 736 Naval Air Squadron’s Hawk T1s played the enemy for warship crews, until the Hawks left Cornwall on 24 March 2022.

The newest tenants are unmanned. 700X Squadron, which had twelve people in 2014, now runs the Navy’s drone work with the National Drone Hub at Predannack, where the UK Military AIP says remotely piloted aircraft routinely fly when the airfield is closed. Its trials led to the Malloy T-150 logistics drone being cleared for front-line use in September 2025, and the Navy’s plan for a hybrid air wing of crewed and uncrewed aircraft is being worked out here.