HMS Heron: The Somerset Airfield the Church Wouldn't Sell

Land the Church Commissioners Wouldn't Part With

The site that became RNAS Yeovilton was first spotted in 1938 by Harald Penrose, Westland Aircraft's chief test pilot, who thought it well suited to aircraft manufacturing, but the land belonged to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who refused to sell.

With war looming the following year, the Admiralty simply solved the problem by compulsorily purchasing 417 acres in 1939 and pressing ahead with construction despite serious drainage problems on the low-lying Somerset levels.

The station was commissioned as HMS Heron on 18 June 1940, reportedly the first purpose-built naval air station commissioned since the end of the First World War, and its inland Somerset location was deliberately chosen to be safer from German air attack than stations along the south coast, a calculation vindicated almost immediately when the exposed RNAS Ford was heavily bombed that May, prompting several units to relocate to the new station instead.

The name is worth a word, because a landlocked airfield in the middle of Somerset being a ship strikes most people as odd. Royal Naval Air Stations are commissioned as shore establishments, which in Royal Navy practice means they are ships, and by convention they take the names of birds: Heron here, and Gannet, Osprey, Fulmar, Condor, Seahawk and Vulture elsewhere. A sailor posted to Yeovilton has always been, formally, appointed to a ship.

War Work and the First Jets

Yeovilton's wartime role grew quickly, hosting squadrons flying Albacores and later Barracudas, a Naval Air Fighter School, and even a runway specially marked out as a mock flight deck for carrier landing practice, while the Westland Aircraft company ran its own repair facility on site throughout the war.

After 1945 the station briefly became a major demobilisation centre, before entering its true postwar calling in 1952 as the shore base for the Fleet Air Arm's new generation of all-weather jet fighters, first Sea Venoms and then Sea Vixens, with runways extended twice during the decade to cope with the demands of jet operations.

Fixed-wing carrier flying for the Fleet Air Arm eventually wound down through the 1970s, with Phantom squadrons handed over to the Royal Air Force and the last UK carrier tail-hook operations finishing in December 1978, a significant moment in naval aviation history that Yeovilton witnessed at close quarters.

It is worth saying how close the whole of naval flying came to ending there. The cancellation of CVA-01 in February 1966 was meant to take the Royal Navy out of the fixed-wing business permanently, on the argument that land-based aircraft could do the job more cheaply. What saved it was the Invincible class, designed as a through-deck cruiser to get past a government that had cancelled carriers, and the Sea Harrier, which the Treasury tried repeatedly to kill and which was not ordered until 1975. Yeovilton was where that aeroplane went, and it is the reason the station is still flying today.

Twenty-One or Twenty-Three Kills, Depending Who You Ask

Yeovilton found a new purpose as home to the Sea Harrier, and it was from here that the squadrons which fought the air war over the Falklands in 1982 were formed and trained.

Eight Hundred Naval Air Squadron deployed aboard HMS Hermes and Eight Zero One aboard HMS Invincible, flying combat sorties often more than three hundred miles from their carriers, and the Fleet Air Arm's Sea Harriers achieved a remarkable combat record for no losses of their own in aerial combat, though sources differ on the precise tally of Argentine aircraft destroyed, with figures of twenty-one and twenty-three both cited by otherwise reliable specialist sources, a small discrepancy worth noting rather than resolving with false confidence.

A Squadron Raised in Three Weeks, and a Rail Filed Down by Hand

Two things behind that record started at Yeovilton and neither is widely known. The first is 809 Naval Air Squadron. Five days after the invasion, Lieutenant Commander Tim Gedge was asked to form an entirely new Sea Harrier squadron and given three weeks to do it. The aircraft were scraped together from training units and reserves, eight of them, and they went south. There were only about twenty Sea Harriers available to the task force at the outset, which is why finding eight more mattered so much.

The second is the missile. The Americans supplied the AIM-9L Sidewinder at short notice, an all-aspect weapon that could be fired at an aircraft from the front rather than only from behind, and it is the single technical reason the air combat record reads as it does. It also very nearly did not fit. The reprofiled canard fins on the new missile fouled the launch rails already on the aircraft, and the answer, on a working airfield with a war three weeks away, was for a chief petty officer to file the rails down until it went on.

That is what a naval air station actually is. Not a runway, but several hundred people who can raise a squadron from nothing in three weeks and modify a missile rail with a hand file because there is no time to ask anybody.

The Sea Harrier squadrons flew on from Yeovilton until finally disbanding in the mid-2000s, and the Royal Navy Historic Flight, which kept vintage aircraft including a Swordfish and Sea Fury airworthy at the station for half a century, only disbanded itself in March 2019.

The date was 31 March 2006, with the ceremony held at Yeovilton on the 28th. What followed is the part worth stating plainly: from that morning until the Queen Elizabeth class reached full operating capability at the end of 2025, the Royal Navy had no fixed-wing fighter of its own. Nineteen years. HMS Invincible had been laid up the year before, and the Harrier force that replaced the Sea Harrier went with the Royal Air Force and was itself retired in 2010.

Helicopters, and a Very Famous French Aircraft

From 1997 Yeovilton became home to the newly formed Commando Helicopter Force, which has since progressed from Wessex and Sea King helicopters through to the Merlin, alongside Wildcat squadrons that replaced the venerable Lynx when it finally retired in 2017.

The station's Fleet Air Arm Museum, founded in 1964 and still operating on the active airfield today, holds more than a hundred aircraft spanning over a century of naval flying, and its single most famous exhibit is not even a naval aircraft at all, Concorde 002, the second Concorde ever built and the first constructed in Britain, a genuine crowd-puller that draws visitors who might otherwise never think to visit a working military airfield.

She flew in on 4 March 1976, having completed 438 test flights, 196 of them at supersonic speed, and she has not moved since. There is a certain symmetry in the second Concorde ever built and the first built in Britain spending her retirement on an operational naval air station, surrounded by aircraft that were also, in their day, the most advanced things anybody could make fly.

One of the Busiest Airfields in the Country

Today RNAS Yeovilton stands as one of the Royal Navy's two principal air stations, covering around a thousand acres and consistently described by the Navy itself as one of the busiest military airfields in the United Kingdom, home to the Wildcat Maritime Force, the Commando Helicopter Force, an Army Aviation reconnaissance regiment, and a NATO electronic warfare unit that has been based there since 2013.

It is a remarkable evolution for a patch of Somerset farmland that the Church of England once flatly refused to sell, only for the Admiralty to simply take it anyway once the country had rather more pressing concerns than a landowner's objections.

The Sourton Down Crash

The work done from Yeovilton has never been without risk. Shortly before four o'clock on the morning of 3 June 2026 a Merlin Mk4, the type flown from the station by the Commando Helicopter Force, came down in a field at Sourton Down, near Okehampton on the northern edge of Dartmoor, during a training exercise. All three members of the Royal Navy aboard were killed. The Navy opened an investigation into the cause the same day.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.