RAF Northolt

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RAF Northolt
Station Crest
Role	Communications Flying
Location	Ruislip, England
Date Founded	May 1915

RAF Northolt (IATA: NHT, ICAO: EGWU) is a Royal Air Force station in the London borough of Hillingdon, in west London, England. Approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of London Heathrow Airport, it also handles a large number of civilian flights. RAF Northolt is not named after the town of Northolt. It is situated in neighbouring Ruislip. Most early RAF airfields were named after the nearest railway station, in this case Northolt Junction (now South Ruislip).

Opened in May 1915 for aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps, it was an active base for RAF and Polish Air Force squadrons during World War II, became a significant civilian airport soon afterwards, and subsequently reverted to military use upon the opening of Heathrow. Communications aircraft of the Royal Canadian Air Force, the United States Air Forces in Europe, the United States Navy, and the Armée de l'Air were based there in the 1950–1980 period. Today, it is an important RAF airfield and the home of 32 (The Royal) Squadron. Since about 1980 movements of privately owned aircraft, mainly corporate jets, have outnumbered military flights. It is also home to the Britten-Norman Islander aircraft of the Northolt Station Flight.

When Fairey Aviation had a factory in Hayes, Hillingdon, some of the company's products—such as the Lysander monoplane — flew first from Northolt Aerodrome.

A memorial to Polish airmen who lost their lives in the Second World War can be seen near the southeastern corner of the airfield. A true-scale GRP replica of a Supermarine Spitfire is mounted alongside the formal entrance road, near to a group of historic hangars that were once camouflaged as a suburban housing estate.

The urban setting of the airfield came to prominence in August 1996, when a Spanish Learjet 25 overran runway 25 to collide with a van heading eastward on the busy adjacent A40 Western Avenue; the aircraft was carrying an actress needing to reach the nearby Pinewood Studios, in Buckinghamshire. Presumably because of its proximity to Pinewood, the airfield has been used to represent several more-exotic locations in feature films, such as in the pre-title sequence of the James Bond film Octopussy, in which it represented a Cuban-style airfield. Media attention was also high when a seriously ill fugitive, Ronald Biggs, was flown here and arrested, and when the body of Diana, Princess of Wales, was flown here from Villacoublay airfield, in Paris, France, after her death in that city.

RAF Northolt is operationally constrained by its proximity to the much larger civilian airport at Heathrow. At least two pilots have confused the two during their final approaches. Two pilots of Boeing 707 commercial aircraft mistakenly flew approaches to Northolt's shorter runway after they had been cleared to land at Heathrow Airport. The first of these, a Pan American aircraft, actually landed there. In days before such navigational aides as instrument landing system (ILS) and the global positioning system (GPS), the letters NO (for Northolt) and HR (for Heathrow) were painted on two gasometers situated on the approach in Southall, in an effort to prevent recurrence of such errors.

No casualties resulted from either erroneous landing. After some 30 years of protracted consideration, an ILS was eventually fitted to Northolt's runway 25, and aggregate-filled safety pits were installed at each end of that runway to protect road users in the event of another bizjet's or military transport's failure to stop or ascend before the runway's end.

[edit] References

• United Kingdom AIP

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