HMS Sultan: The Airfield That Taught the World to Fly Before It Taught the Navy to Repair Engines

A Genuine Birthplace of Modern Flight Training

Before it was ever associated with marine engineering, the Military Road site at Gosport had a long and significant aviation history, operating as a Royal Flying Corps and later Royal Air Force airfield from 1914. Its most remarkable chapter came between 1916 and 1917, when Major Robert Smith-Barry established his School of Special Flying there and devised what became known as the Gosport System, a deliberately radical approach that taught pilots to recover from dangerous manoeuvres rather than simply avoid them.

The method was so effective that it was adopted globally, with Lord Trenchard crediting Smith-Barry with having taught the air forces of the world how to fly, a particularly remarkable legacy for what would later become, on the surface at least, a rather more workmanlike engineering school.

From Flying Boats to Engine Rooms

The airfield passed to the Admiralty in 1945 as a Royal Naval Air Station, initially commissioned under the name HMS Siskin, before flying finally ceased there on 1 June 1956, at which point a Mechanical Repair Establishment relocated from Portsmouth Dockyard and the site was renamed HMS Sultan. From that point on it developed into the Royal Navy's principal engineering training establishment, expanding over subsequent decades to cover marine engineering, general service and submarine engineering, and later air engineering trades as well, training generations of the technicians who keep the fleet's machinery running.

More to Explore

Threatened With Closure, Then Saved

HMS Sultan's future looked notably uncertain for a period in the 2010s, after a 2016 Ministry of Defence estate review proposed disposing of the site entirely, with closure initially pencilled in for around 2026. Sustained local campaigning followed, led in part by the local Member of Parliament, who called the proposed closure a huge mistake for the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy and Gosport alike, and by March 2019 the closure date had already been pushed back to no earlier than 2029.

The site's future was finally secured outright in December 2022, when the Ministry of Defence formally reversed the closure decision, stating plainly that it was retaining HMS Sultan for which it had an enduring requirement, a genuine reprieve for an establishment that had spent the best part of a decade under threat.

Engineering the Navy of Tomorrow

Following a further reorganisation in November 2024, command of the site's marine engineering training passed from a joint tri-service structure back to purely Royal Navy control, with the training function now known as the Marine Engineering Training Group, sitting alongside the separate Royal Naval Air Engineering and Survival School and a Nuclear Department run in partnership with the Defence Academy. HMS Sultan today also maintains its own Marine Engineering Museum and Airfield Museum, the latter a direct, deliberate nod back to the site's earlier life training the pilots who, in Smith-Barry's day, first worked out how to teach flying properly in the first place.

You Might Also Like